Deep neural networks more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation - <AUTHOR> https://psyarxiv.com/hv28a/ <comment><USER2> If you read the paper, the photos and labels were sourced from a dating website. In my opinion, there is a good chance that the model may be overfitting to how people wish to present themselves in that context. - e.g. framing of the photo, facial expression etc. Things with a heavy amount of cultural conditioning.

Some of the press around this seems a bit alarmist - I doubt you would see anywhere near this accuracy out in the real world.

<comment><USER3> They address overfitting, presentation and context in the paper. Their DNN was using facial features that had been extracted by VGG-Face, which is a widely used thing that reduces a face to a vector of scores that are meant to be independent of transient features such as facial expression, background, orientation, lighting, contrast, and similar.

By having their DNN train on faces that have been processed by VGG-Face, they greatly reduce the risk of overfitting or relying on things that would be present in dating site pictures but not in pictures of the same people in other contexts.

<comment><USER4> They use multiple pictures from the same profile. Does the test set include any people that were in the training set?

<comment><USER4> The problem being, even if they are different photos, if the same people are in the test set, it may just be recognizing people.

Instead of learning, that person looks like a gay person.

It learns, that person looks like Tim, who is gay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Line 210: > "Gay and heterosexual people were represented in equal numbers."

According to Gallup Polling, around 4% of the American population is homosexual. So, let's be generous and say that their classifier has a 80% accuracy _given balanced inputs_ while humans have 60%.

Let's sample 100 people of the dataset, 50 of which are homosexual (and the rest heterosexual). If the classifier has 80% accuracy (let's assume false_positive_rate = false_negative_balance since I didn't find information about that), it means that 80 people were correctly classified, 10 heterosexuals were misclassified as homosexuals and 10 homosexuals as heterosexuals.

According to the Bayes theorem, "Given a random person, probability of being homosexual assuming that the classifier said so" = "Probability of being homosexual of a random person (the so-called prior)" <times> "Probability of classifier saying it's homosexual, assuming it's indeed homosexual <divided by> "Given a random person, probability of saying it's homosexual".

Substituting, we get: P = 0.04 * 0.8 / 0.5 = 0.064

If instead of the classifier we use human "feeling", we get: P=0.04 * 0.6 / 0.5 = 0.048

In summary, 4% of the people are homosexual. If a human thinks someone is homosexual, the probability "increases" to 4.8%. If on the contrary their algorithm believes it's homosexual, the probability of actually being homosexual increases to 6.4%.

Not very groundbreaking...

<comment><USER6> I don't know if I can follow. You say that if their classifier had 100% accuracy, then the probability of being homosexual would increase to 8%? That doesn't make much sense.

<comment><USER7> Look here [1]

Very good explanation (though the op's one are too)

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

<comment><USER6> But why does "Given a random person, probability of saying it's homosexual" equal 0.5? I'd say that should be 0.04.

<comment><USER8> This is the part of his explanation I find confusing too, though I do agree with his general argument: the results aren't really useful when they haven't been tested on a dataset representative of the real distribution.

From what I can gather he's basically saying that the "probability of a random face being classified as homosexual" is 0.5. This isn't REALLY true (would have to run the classifier on all possible faces to find this), but that is in fact the "environment" the classifier has been trained within.

<comment><USER9> If the test set of images really were 50/50 and the human judges weren't told that, then they were effectively given inaccurate priors, which would obviously reduce their accuracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Page 22 of the report has an image of average faces for men and women and gay / straight (bisexuality doesn't seem to be covered).

> The results show that the faces of gay men were more feminine and the faces > of lesbians were more masculine than those of their respective heterosexual > counterpart

It looks to me you're gay if you are a man wearing glasses and straight if you have a beard and rounder face. It would be interesting to see what it made of the stereotypical "bear". If you're a brunette and have a slightly thinner face then you're probably, 58%, a lesbian ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

> lesbians tended to wear baseball caps

I'm really not sure what to make of this.

<comment><USER11> Yes, that page caught my eye, too. My conclusion is that gay people are better-looking.

<comment><USER12> Well, don't forget self-selection effects in the population sample. It's highly possible those who are better looking are more confident about posting their profiles openly for analysis. The confounders for studies such as these are multiple and treacherous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is very likely the same as detecting women by "they have long hair" \- it's not finding intrinsic characteristics, but social ones.

<comment><USER14> I don't know about you, but when trying to figure out if someone is female by sight alone, long hair is a big clue, after clothing and before facial characteristics. Visual analysis can only reveal surface characteristics that are subject to manipulation (up to and including hormone therapy and plastic surgery), not "intrinsic", whatever that means.

<comment><USER15> What is your point though? Who cares how it does it? The fact that it can tell gay from straight will have privacy implications for both. Not to mention that it is not revealed in the study how much of the feature set was based on grooming. This is pure speculation. Clearly these trigger points mean more minuses for me and a lack of any sensible discussion of the actual point of the study.

<comment><USER14> My point is that the poster I was responding to seemed to want something magical, something I don't think is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a bit skeptical of their claim that "Human judges achieved much lower accuracy". The deep net likely found a some feature that correlated with sexuality presumably after looking at many tagged images.

I wonder whether the "judges" had access to that same training set. If they were people off the street that brought in their own biases, I would suspect they would do far worse than if they were able to view the training set themselves and teach themselves what hetero and homosexual people look like. Many heterosexual people have very limited contact with homosexual people. But given a training set (or sufficient contact with homosexual people), they could learn too, and I suspect they could learn better than the machine learning algorithm.

That said, this research is impressive, as well as terrifying and depressing.

<comment><USER11> >That said, this research is impressive, as well as terrifying and depressing.

I know why you say this, but it's only terrifying because there are so many idiots around. All this study says is that there is a strong genetic/developmental component to sexuality - something we've known about for decades.

Telling people they can't be gay is like telling people they can't be tall, or black.

<comment><USER9> I am less concerned that there may be visibly identifiable characteristics of homosexuality. I am more concerned that these features can be automatically discerned by computers on a massive scale. It's one thing for an individual homophobe to call out someone because they look gay. It's quite another for a government or organization to do that to millions of people in seconds, and then act upon it at scale.

<comment><USER16> Do you think the authors of the paper are the first to think of this idea of detecting personal traits with facial features? How much cost do you think it takes for implementing detection with this particular set of features?

If it can be done it will be done. In this particular case it doesn't even cost much. You should have started to be concerned when machine learning evolved into a paradigm that is only possible to achieve any kind of real world performance with an amount of data and computing resources available only to megacorps and governments.

<comment><USER9> > If it can be done it will be done. Nonsense. Scientists and grad students > have ethical standards and refrain from unethical research all the time. > This paper was written by a business school grad student, who may be more > interested in clicks than in moving the state of the art forward.

<comment><USER16> I think what I implied was it will be done by entities without moral considerations, such as capitals and governments. In this sense it's not very productive to censor individual researchers from publicizing these kind of findings. Technology will evolve. The question to ask is who will control the technology. By censoring you're just blinding yourself from what's coming. And my second point was the imbalance of power started when individual control of intelligence capabilities was no longer possible after the field moved to "data driven" and "deep learning" paradigms.

<comment><USER9> You can study the idea and science without doing the deed. The U.S. could have learned about atomic bombs without dropping one. Tech companies can learn about image recognition without categorizing everyone based on their photo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Necessary link to an article by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the lead of an ML team at Google: "Physiognomy's New Clothes" [0]

He gives several examples, and explains how these type of statements are extremely misleading (and dangerous!), and not something new at all...

[https://medium.com/@blaisea/physiognomys-new- clothes-f2d4b59...](https://medium.com/@blaisea/physiognomys-new- clothes-f2d4b59fdd6a)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is creepy. First, there is no serious scientific proof that your facial expression can tell if you are homosexual or not. Correlations here are total garbage. Sexuality is a really complex thing to discuss and, most importantly, is a private thing. Second, software detecting if someone is gay or not seems to me quite similar to jews being forced to wear the Star of David in Nazi Germany, so everyone could spot them and act against them, including people being wrongly labeled. Seriously guys, stop this. We have to be really careful about the potential uses our software. There can be serious impacts in society and in people lives.

<comment><USER19> The ethical and moral implications are enormous. But machine learning and AI are not going away.

We must make our best effort to understand how this works, not bury our head in the sand as hostile actors use this for ill.

<comment><USER18> So what do you suggest, for example in this case?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In cultures where homosexuals are persecuted, a tool like this could be devastating.

<comment><USER21> They mention this in the article.

Even so, it is disheartening. It appears we're so fascinated by all the avenues tools like deep learning could open up, to ask more basic questions like the implications of pursuing such research.

<comment><USER22> The first author of this also developed tools that allow you to analyse all sorts of personality traits (including sexual orientation) via FB likes. He was aware and publicised of the potential consequences and risks here, but I seem to remember thinking his reasons for publishing were justified at the time. As he was part of the psychology department during his PhD, I think his papers will have been extensively scrutinised by ethics boards and the like.

Mini disclaimer: I vaguely knew him from university and didn't get on with him. However, I don't think he was the type of person to put people at risk for personal glory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Isn't this a result you should immediately be skeptical of because the results are so significant? I mean, the idea that you can detect sexual orientation from facial images seems somewhat plausible, but no way I would immediately buy that a classifier can discriminate just from the facial-structure with 81% accuracy as the title may imply, for instance. To be fair, in their abstract the authors mention grooming style and so on, but I feel that the title alone is slightly misleading.

Also: man, that preprint formatting is annoying to read.

<comment><USER24> 81% accuracy in binary classification isn't something to write home about, either...

<comment><USER9> I'd bet you'd get a lot higher accuracy from scanning a facebook profile's metadata than from their image.

That said, the concern of this is the potential to do this on at scale in a horrible distopia. Cameras in airports and on sidewalks automatically scan people for "undesirable" features and they end up in reeducation camps or just simply disappearing.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, especially if you had the "Interested in..." field.

Just wait until somebody publishes a "terrorist facial classifier" with "99% accuracy". That's when I'll be scared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would really hope that they don't publish more information and keep algorithms as secret as possible. Algorithms like this can have huge implications in countries where homosexuality is banned. If this really works, people could end up in jail just because a neural network determines that they look gay. And even if it doesn't work, some governments or local communities could still use it to ban people because of the chance that they're gay.

While I'm not a fan of censoring research, I think this is a case where the research community should refrain from publishing results that could help replicating such algorithms.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't say that this study makes sense or works. But there are areas where large parts of the population really hate homosexuality. Just thinking this could work can make them use such a system. Especially in situations where you can afford false positives. So next time you want to travel to a country it could happen that they don't let you in because the algorithm says that you're likely gay.

<comment><USER26> It wouldn't take long for a government to replicate the study even if it is not published if it is sufficiently interested

<comment><USER9> Getting a prototype working would take a week for a skilled machine learning engineer, assuming they had access to well labeled tagged data.

What will be difficult is to push the accuracy up to get actionable information from it. Assuming you're an evil repressive regime, even if you're system had 90% accuracy, you'd be falsely accusing a huge number of people and doubt even a repressive homophobic regime would implement it. Getting that 90% accuracy to 99.9% or higher would take a huge effort, this study isn't anywhere close.

That said, the concerns are real. Automatically sorting hetero from homosexual people, Jews from Christians, or even black from white comes with a tone of moral issues.

<comment><USER27> Getting buy-in from an evil repressive regime will be hard if we assume they have a population distribution like anyone else which means a sizeable proportion of those in power are gay but not openly.

<comment><USER9> Not sure about that. In the US it seems that the most vocal opponents of gay rights often get caught with their pants down in some embarrassing homosexual encounter.

<comment><USER27> Quite. This technology will terrify them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The title is surprisingly not too clickbaity, although it's not as clear-cut: in order to reduce false positives (increase precision), they need to limit the number of positives (reduce recall). On 1000 samples containing 70 gay people, they were able to get a 10% false positive rate on their positive results, which were 10 people (meaning 12% of the total gay sample). The sample is a bit biased too because they pulled it from explicitly gay-oriented public social network pages (but I don't fault them for that, it would be quite hard to find a better sample).

It is still an impressive result, and one that might be misused badly, despite the numerous warnings used in the paper.

<comment><USER7> This is the classic "false positive paradox"[1]. Commonly present in medical testing. Even if false positive rate is very low, if the positive value is very low too, the likelihood of being victim of false can be high.

The exemple in the wikipedia page are very good. I had to explain that to a friend which had tested positive on the HIV test and was waiting for confirmation over the weekend. Not easy to talk math when such things happens.. I found it very troubling that doctors don't even mention that to patient and present tests as 95% effective. (In fact she was fine)

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The potential for abuse is enormous, even if the results aren't 100% accurate (which they cannot ever be). And not just in the obvious ways. Will they be able to detect pedophilia with any accuracy? Good luck getting a job when employers covertly figure out your score is more than 50%. Good luck becoming a public figure when a large portion of the population take statistics at face value. Good luck having a life once the mob (aka. SJW) hears about it.

<comment><USER30> This is my big fear. If people will shoot up pizza places over false accusations of pedophilia, any sort of algorithm that claims to predict it (regardless of efficacy), and people will be murdered.

America has a bunch of angry people with twitchy trigger-fingers just begging for targets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> 'breaking news: neural network speeds up personal intepretations of scientist a bit'

<comment><USER32> yep. This is phrenology. Bias laundering at best.

<comment><USER33> I was just imagining sourcing mugshot sites and then tracking those who were tried and considered guilty of whatever they got the mugshot for to train a good/bad person model.

It's fun, but I'd never dare to make such a dumb thing public.

<comment><USER17> This article [0] discusses a paper by Chinese researchers [1] that did just that. (and yes, it is quite dumb/dangerous)

[0] [https://medium.com/@blaisea/physiognomys-new- clothes-f2d4b59...](https://medium.com/@blaisea/physiognomys-new- clothes-f2d4b59fdd6a) [1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135](https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04135)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Total garbage. There will need to be some laws put in place soon to stop this type of thing by companies, otherwise we're going pure Gattaca. The nearest term risk for AI making your life suck is basically encoding people's biases into models that are used to affect your life. This "research" is the equivalent of making an inference like "He's poor so he must be black, etc.."

</comment><comment><USER29> In "Serving the Reich"+, Philip Ball talks about how "pure" science lost its innocence when nukes were first deployed, and argues that researchers cannot absolve themselves by claiming that they didn't know how their research would be used. The same applies here: nothing good can come from this.

\+ Hi trolls, yes, I'm aware of Godwin's Law. I also didn't call anybody a Nazi.

</comment><comment><USER27> I can't seem to load the page, but I'd imagine this is "declared sexual orientation" rather than actual, which makes this a poor tool for discrimination

<comment><USER3> The images were from a dating site. They inferred sexual orientation from the gender of the partners that the subjects were looking for according to their profiles.

<comment><USER35> That is declared sexual orientation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you know would show a list of 100 heterosexual man to this neural machine, it would probably qualify a high percentage as gay. Since it was learning on a 50/50 dataset.

</comment><comment><USER37> THAT Michal Kosinski... I wonder where the seed for this idea started, such that it germinated so far. Are people still doing this in the second decade of the 21st century?

</comment><comment><USER9> A bit disheartened to see that this paper came out of Stanford. Of all the great applications of ML and computer vision, they have to pick a project that attracts clicks but has far more negative value than positive. How about identifying people that have clinical depression? Or for a skin disease? Or if they like to surf or play basketball? Or if they are good chess players? Even just hot dog or not hot dog.

The study seems intentionally divisive. I get that a Stanford BSchool student would take it on to attract attention, but disappointed that Stanford would get behind it.

</comment><comment><USER38> just imagine, you can spot people sexual orientation with your google glasses, and god knows how many other features, not only from the people face, also from him speech pattern, and eye movement. seriously!!!, the first time that machine learning start to worry me, my mistake. I never considered how vicious the human can be. if those types of studies continue the future will be a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER39> First of all if you didn't read the whole paper, this picture is really interesting and a good summary: [https://i.imgur.com/zs8RWIz.png](https://i.imgur.com/zs8RWIz.png)

As for the debate over whether this research is ethical, consider this. If someone actually uses this to discriminate against homosexuals, they must accept that the thing actually works. Which means that homosexuality is determined by biological features beyond anyone's control, which would contradict their own ideology.

And that is the most interesting part of this work, not whether this tool is very accurate or not. This pretty solidly proves that physical features correlate well with sexual orientation, which is strong evidence for the biological theory of sexual orientation. Which has always been one of the biggest arguments for gay rights, that it's not a choice and can't be changed.

On the usefulness of this test to actually classify gay people:

They claim 91% accuracy on a balanced dataset. E.g. where there the ratio of gays to straights is 50:50. To get a ratio of correct:incorrect of 91:9 on such a dataset, their test must increase or decrease the odds a person is gay by 10.

Now in the general population, the ratio of gays to straights is about 16 to 984 (1.6%). So if their test gives someone a positive reading, that increases the odds to 162 to 984, or 14%. So you can't use this test to accurately guess someone's sexual orientation. Simply because gay people are so rare that even a few percent of straight people misclassified will overwhelm the number of actual gay people.

But still that's a lot more accurate than human guessing or the base rate, and it's scientifically interesting that this is even possible. It's a proof of concept that higher accuracy may be possible with better methods and more data.

Another article claims this:

>when asked to pick out the ten faces it was most confident about, nine of the chosen were in fact gay. If the goal is to pick a small number of people who are very likely to be gay out of a large group, the system appears able to do so.

The test gives varying degrees of confidence, it gives much higher confidence to some people than others. There are some individuals that it can tell are definitely gay or straight. But for most it is more uncertain.

Also note that the estimates for the percentage of gay people vary a lot. Which could make the true accuracy as high as 42%. Also some people believe sexuality is more of a spectrum than a binary straight/gay. If so the straight people it misclassifies might lean more on the gay/bisexual spectrum than normal and the errors wouldn't seem so unreasonable.

Lastly all these "phrenology" references are silly. If you have methodological problem with this research I'd love to hear it. But I see people discarding the research simply because they don't like the conclusions. For this study and other facial correlations based research.

This isn't new at all, there's tons of scientific research about digit ratios and all kinds of correlations they have with different things ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio)). Why wouldn't we expect even better correlations from all facial features?

</comment><comment><USER40> Code is opinion and the idea that you can predict or identify things of this nature is just human prejudice masquerading as something more.

Some human programmers got together and thought they could identify sexual orientation from faces, a silly bar room level idea in itself with no basis in reality and trained a neural net to express this prejudice. This is the same thing as a seer claiming to see the future.

</comment><comment><USER41> With Facebook profile photos you could detect sexual orientation with 81% probability for man and 74% for women... Hmmm... And with 91% / 83% probability when using 5 photos/person in the learning process...

<comment><USER7> Well, I am not sure this is the case.. The metric seems to be the ability to tell apart pairs of straight and gay people.

>Among men, the classification accuracy equaled AUC = .81 when provided with one image per person. This means that in 81% of randomly selected pairs—composed of one gay and one heterosexual man—gay men were correctly ranked as more likely to be gay.

Pretty different from predicting one's sexual orientation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Serious question by someone who's not into this kind of stats too much:

What would happen if you took a big set of Facebook profiles and train some (the same if you wanna) CNN to classify picture->f for each f in profile features. Sure, for some features, your model should be able to deliver decent precision.

Does this mean that you quickly found out what features can be predicted from pictures & how well your CNN performs on that? Or is it possible that you just train models from picture->X where X is basically meaningless but significantly correlated with some feature because of the effect portrait in xkcd's "Significant" (Scientists investigate!) [1]

[1]: [https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)

<comment><USER11> There is a tendency for machine learning (including neural networks) to over- fit data - i.e. the algorithm learns to recognise the particular data, rather than the real distinguishing predictors of the groups. As you say, these can be features that are by chance associated with what you are trying to discriminate.

This is why the model is validated on a separate testing group from the training group which created it. There are lots of ways to do this, and the more sophisticated continually iterate training and testing to improve the model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The people working on this need to stop, sit down, and have a long, hard think about what they're doing. And about how ultimately this will be used to persecute and gill gay men.

<comment><USER44> Actually, their work seems to be focused on dispelling the common disbelief in these kind of applications for technology.

From the abstract: "Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people's intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women."

Acknowledging that data analysis can create obstacles to freedom or serious social problems is a necessary step to preventing or addressing these issues, but public opinion is far from being there yet...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> gAIdar?

</comment><comment><USER46> Is this serious?

<comment><USER25> Research around this existed for years, it could be shown that gays can more easily detect the sexual orientation of others. One explanation could be that since homosexuality was/is banned in many cultures, this helped to survive.

A reason why we didn't read much about it is that most researchers know that you shouldn't publish about this. Otherwise you can quickly end up with blood on your hands.

<comment><USER46> AI DL ... etc. are just tools ... if one is not careful, one would run the risk of GIGO == garbage in, garbage out ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> But sexual orientation is fluid according to the fringe psycho-babble pseudo science crowd.

<comment><USER48> Check all the people worried that 'gay' may not be a 'lifestyle choice'.</comment></comment>


About cracking GSM: 1479_26C3.Karsten.Nohl.GSM.pdf - <AUTHOR> http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/Fahrplan/attachments/1479_26C3.Karsten.Nohl.GSM.pdf <comment><USER2> I don't know. This guy just reiterated things that were known years ago. And he claims he cracked GSM...

<comment><USER3> The difference is that they completed the computation of the rainbow tables, which are required to make this attack practical, and made them public (although the webserver with the torrent files is currently down: <http://reflextor.com/torrents/>). Of course theoretically this attack is known for quite some time, but making it practical by providing the equipment and rainbow tables is new.

Interesting enough they planned to do a workshop today, where you could bring your GSM data and they wanted to try to decrypt it. However, due to legal reasons they had to cancel it ([http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/The_demonstration_is...](http://events.ccc.de/congress/2009/wiki/The_demonstration_is_canceled)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this mean people will have to replace billions of phones with a new code?

</comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone found a video of this talk yet?

<comment><USER6> Torrent: <http://rnmshot.dvrdns.org/>

HTTP: <http://22.214.171.124/26C3/GSM/>

<comment><AUTHOR> great !!</comment></comment></comment>


~$1 trillion of real estate is on the move … here's why - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/99-mph/1-trillion-of-real-estate-is-on-the-move-heres-why-94ee9233e5eb <comment><USER2> The article doesn't really make it clear, but is this assuming that cost of transit is the same or less than current options? I mean, I ride my bike to work and my wife walks. Our commutes are short and cost effectively nothing. So for us, the appearance of AVs makes no difference at all.

During the Great Housing Bubble, there was the notion of 'drive till you can afford it,' promoting suburban sprawl further and further out from the city center. Until rising gas prices made that a bad option.

And if this further erodes funding for public transit, what happens to the folks who can't afford other options?

<comment><AUTHOR> Those are great questions.

I definitely think that you are in the minority of having both partners able to commute at zero cost. I bet that's pretty sweet? Does rent/payment cost a bit more than if you were 15 minutes further to work (headed out of town)?

I think the point is that proximity to places of employment have created a premium in housing that should lessen if work was able to be completed during a commute. Essentially, valuable real estate that is considered "drive till you afford it" may go up in price substantially.</comment></comment>


Catalog Reveals NSA Has Back Doors for Numerous Devices - SPIEGEL ONLINE - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer= <comment><USER2> The main discussion is here[0], with additional submissions here[1], here[2], and here[3]. There are more.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979457)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979483)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979600](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6979600)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6980672)</comment>


Show HN: Fabrica – Create data-driven web apps without writing code - <AUTHOR> https://www.fabrica.dev/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! Excited to show what I've been working on to everyone, and happy to answer any questions here. This started as a way to scratch my itch for something that would let me skip a lot of the yak-shaving for my various ideas and projects that I wanted to get up and running quickly. Let me know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> you might want to put how many users the app can have. even if it's unlimited for all plans.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the good idea! I'll stick that in the pricing chart.</comment></comment>


What I learned today about SNCF and California HSR (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://marketurbanism.com/2012/07/10/what-i-learned-today-about-sncf-and-california-hsr/ <comment><USER2> > Namely, they wanted to make a straight shot from LA to San Francisco by > running along the flat, government-owned I-5 corridor with spurs out to the > eastern Central Valley, whereas the California High Speed Rail Authority > (CHSRA) and state politicians wanted the main line to go through every > little town in the Central Valley, directly.

For Germans, this is nothing new. Local/regional politicians always want to have the ICE (Intercity Express, our version of high-speed rail) stop in their more or less tiny village.

The problem is almost always that the villages lack adequate rail connections to the next hub, and I imagine that this problem is even more expressed in the US, given the near total lack of passenger rail...

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a classical example of American "worst of both worlds" governance. People in Bakersfield aren't going to take the HSR to LA, at least not in enough numbers to justify connecting Bakersfield to the HSR. It'd be better to just build a straight-shot HSR and take all the money you save and give a tax break to folks in Bakersfield, or _something_. But our political system isn't able to achieve that result.

How do European countries deal with it? It's not like Germany and France don't have rural areas versus urban areas (vast swaths of both countries are farmland).

<comment><USER4> In Germany the ICE train mostly runs on existing routes, for newly build routes you have to make the trade off between connecting cities and travel time.

But not connecting a city of almost 400,000 people is odd, it should get a stop. I don't think the Deutsche Bahn oder SCNF would be allowed not connecting those cities in their home markets.

<comment><USER5> I know quite a few folks living out there in the central valley, they are very conservative. They _hate_ the idea of costly train being built with their tax money.

That doesn't mean they wouldn't grow to like it eventually, but it wont help ridership in its early and fragile years.

<comment><USER6> Never underestimate the ability of "very conservative" people, who hate tax- funded infrastructure, to nonetheless be heavy users of that infrastructure.

Remember, even Ayn Rand accepted payments from entitlement programs she hated.

<comment><USER3> It's not a question of liberal versus conservative. The main value of HSR is allowing people to rapidly move between city centers for business or pleasure. How often do people in Bakersfield need to go to LA or SF?

<comment><USER7> If the HSR is fast enough, it might induce a long distance commuter community in bakersfield as it induces demand. So it's hard to say.

It's kind of like the joke that it's cheaper to live in vegas and fly every day to work in SF than to live in SF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those interested, here is a rebuttal article, also from 2012: [http://www.cahsrblog.com/2012/07/new-evidence-shows-flaws- in...](http://www.cahsrblog.com/2012/07/new-evidence-shows-flaws-in-sncf-plan- for-california-hsr/)

<comment><USER9> When the rebuttal letter literally says "I am aware that there was significant controversy over SNCF in 2010, emanating from their role in deporting French Jews to death camps during WW II", I suspect the reasoning is more political bickering than anything else.

Even if the company did literally support the Nazis during the French occupation over 70 years ago, that's no reason to boycott them now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had guessed this would work myself:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13632763](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13632763)

Note that neither I nor SMCF had suggested the cities on SR-99 would be excluded from the HSR service area, but that transportation "spurs" would be created at some point in the future to connect those towns to the HSR conveniently. This concurs with projected trip data (linked and discussed in above thread) suggesting that most trips from the CV cities end north of the Gilroy or south of Palmdale, i.e. Bakersfield to Fresno even with direct-to- city HSR has difficulty competing with the convenience of cars (which are going to get cheaper as battery technology improves). As such it's my opinion that HSR on the I-5 corridor would not really underserve those towns, although they would (correctly IMO) no longer be the first to get rail connectivity.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone know why using spurs (branch lines) is a bad thing?

For example, the BART runs a branch line to Dublin/Pleasanton (and possibly Livermore) but it's not part of the "trunk" to Richmond.

<comment><USER4> The route is branching, you have a route from LA to San Francisco but it is branching to Merced and later this branch gets extended to Sacramento.

It is always a trade-off, you'll never get the perfect route.

<comment><USER12> I also think that people get way too hung up on the SF to LA bit. Where the California HSR is about a lot more than just that. The SF -> LA -> San Diego part is actually mostly about freeing up airports to handle longer distance national and international traffic.

The central valley part is to tie the central valley cities to the each other and to the coastal cities. I think another part to is try to reduce future sprawl of the central valley cities. Much as people in Bakersfield and Fresno may hate that, it's the right thing to do going forward.

Other part that is totally ignored is that most of the riders will be commuters similar to BART. They won't go from SF to LA, but from SF to San Jose, or Morgan Hill to San Jose, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting gossip, but someone talking about private financing in a meeting seems quite far from having a deal lined up?

</comment><comment><USER9> If this project makes financial sense, ideally an existing railroad company would run it.

Berkshire Hathaway (as the owners of the BNSF railroad) is the only US-based company that has the capital and railroad experience to even consider it.

In this situation, I'm not sure how or why the California government would turn away any foreign company willing to do it.

<comment><USER14> The project can make sense for the State of California in ways that are impossible for private investors. For example, providing fast convenient transport to places people want to go generally increases the value of land. The state can benefit from this passively via its taxing authority while a private investor would have to purchase land outright with an enormous capital outlay (if it were possible at all). HSR is also a substitute good for short- haul air travel, which is typically provided with government subsidy (in the form of airports).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 2012

</comment><comment><USER16> HSR is a great example of what happens when a bunch of coastal elites look at the countryside ("flyover country") and assume it's empty and worthless so nobody will object if they run a bulldozer through it for a big government project.

On the contrary, California's Central Valley is one of the most vibrant and important areas of the state with property claims going back to the homesteading period. So shocking that these people aren't happy with a bunch of LA and SF people wanting to tear up their back yards for a boondoggle they will never use or care about.

<comment><USER17> The amount of land needed for HSR is much less than that needed to transport current and future population by either air or road. Just look a how much prime land SR-99 and of course many HSR opponents want to widen it.

<comment><USER16> Nice talking point. Locals actually use roads. They will never use this "bullet" train to go to cities hundreds of miles away from where they live and work.

<comment><USER17> Think how happy locals will be then that the people traveling farther aren't clogging up the roads.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Proverbial Wallets - <AUTHOR> http://eco.media.mit.edu/static/proverbialwallets/index.html

<comment><USER2> Totally useless non-invention.

We receive emails, SMS and mobile app alerts already. And those we can see even after the fact, unlike some BS wallet vibration while we were, say, driving.

<comment><USER3> At first sight it may be useless (in this form anyway) but I've read that people tend to spend more by having credit cards because you don't have a physical reminder of how much money you have left, it is just a digital number. I'm predicting that in the future we will have solutions to bring back some physical stimuli to our digital transactions.

See also: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1336164/Smart...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1336164/Smart- wallets-change-shape-stop-spending-money-online.html)

<comment><USER2> > _I'm predicting that in the future we will have solutions to bring back some > physical stimuli to our digital transactions._

Who will than benefit? Not the store, and not the credit card company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Exhibited at Ars Electronica 2009".

It also resists opening when your account is low, and inflates or deflates depending on how much you have in your account. It's more an art project I think...

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha I didn't see that! It absolutely is more of a thought experiment than a real product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I need is a wallet that delivers a small electric shock any time I buy something from Amazon or iTunes. That would retrain my brain from thinking, "Oh, it's only 99 cents, why not" to "I don't need to zap myself for yet another todo list app."

</comment><comment><USER6> I have the equivalent of this already: my bank sends an SMS on every transaction.

<comment><AUTHOR> The wallets actually do a lot more than that. Besides vibrating when your bank account makes a transaction, they will make it harder to open when money is tight, expand and shrink when you have more or less money respectively.

It's about being intuitive and using metaphors to create "Proverbial wallets that allow it's user to experience a financial sixth sense".

<comment><USER6> Yes, I'm aware the idea involves more than that. I just wanted to point out my phone is already being explored for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And make it harder and more injury inflicting, especially for those who keep in the back jeans pocket.

Besides being useless, it's absurd too!</comment>


Show HN: I created a modern retake on .plans inspired by John Carmack's plans - <AUTHOR> http://www.dotplan.me/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I started journaling my own development process at [http://www.dotplan.me/project/2](http://www.dotplan.me/project/2).

I would love some feedback, even if it is not positive.</comment>


Entrepreneurs don't have a gene for risk–they come from families with money - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene-for-risk-they-come-from-families-with-money <comment><USER3> From my view it seems factors 'families with money' bring are;

\- Finance: As per article family financial support can get people over one of the biggest hurdles of getting a business off the ground. Also coming from an upper income family odds are you have a higher income and more savings to invest/risk.

\- People they grew up around: If you grow up around people owning/running companies you are more likely to see this as a reality for yourself. You also have personalities to emulate in chasing this goal.

\- History of tech: Wealthier families has more access to tech in the past, although changing today. In my school age most kids didn't have access to their own computer, even at uni. This would be a barrier to leaning about IT that could build future behavior.

\- Connections: Growing up in a privileged environment you develop connections that can be useful. Also learn how to behave among people who are in a position of power to help you and develop the 'we are similar people' bond.

\- Sense of Entitlement: A great line from Rory Sutherlands TED talk was Oxford/Cambridge doesn't buy you a great education, it buys you a great sense of entitlement. This give you confidence to go achieve great things. In my small world I have clearly seen this difference from people who grew up on different side of the tracks though it seems to be changing a bit now.

\- Expectations: People growing up in a more privileged world have higher expectations placed on them. To a degree this can push people to try harder to build something significant rather than just reach a reasonable level of comfort a more general job will offer.

\- Fallback Option: I imagine this is one of the more important, people from a comfortable family know if their venture goes south they wont be homeless. Their family/friends will make sure they have board, food and an ability to restart. This puts them in a position to risk all with out the same downside.

<comment><USER4> The last one likely matters the most, at least in my case. Ambitious ideas take more time than just product development/implementation. Marketing and business development run on much lengthier schedules. At half a year in on savings, I'm being pulled away from full-time on my startup back into contract work, where I'm constantly encouraged to just go full-time instead with these companies (mostly founding-stage startups with funding). Meanwhile, my entrepreneur friends who come from exceptionally wealthy backgrounds have no such constraints or risk of going homeless if their startup doesn't get funding or start making revenue. I'm not sure if I'll be able to make rent next month, short of a loan, unless I get a contract invoice paid in full within two weeks. I'll be just fine, but that fear of not making it on the basics is not weightless. I suspect I'll be looked at differently when it shows that it took me N months to get to X revenue, instead of 0.25N, as a result of just needing to survive.

<comment><USER5> The "fallback option" matters in so much and is something that's, IMHO, extremely underdiscussed in society. I see politicians rail about how poor people don't risk anything without themselves realizing that they come from middle-class/rich backgrounds and could risk more in their lives.

In my case, I've moved from Germany to Australia without many prospects and still managed to land on my feet. Friends with less money always asked me "aren't you scared?", after a while the realization hit me - I wasn't particularly scared because if things wouldn't have worked out, I could've just used my parents' credit card for a $2000 flight back, no need to worry. My "poorer" friends don't have that option so they're naturally scared of something I didn't even consider, an "unknown unknown" for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have found the opposite for 'vanilla' entrepreneurs; for a few years, I was part of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization (YEO), which collected under-40 founders of businesses with over $1mm in revenue.

The Boston chapter had over 100 people in it, maybe closer to 250? Of those, almost none had 'top tier' degrees. Almost none had business school degrees. In fact, for a community of fairly wealthy Bostonians, it was notable how few had come through top-tier schools or advanced degree programs of any sort.

Startup entrepreneurs might be different, and I've only read the article about the paper, but I just don't see this in my own entrepreneurial experience; most entrepreneurs I have known outside of Silicon Valley were motivated hard working types; some were visionaries, some were operations geniuses, some accidentally bought out their partners or bosses and got left with a business, most were from blue collar or middle class families.

Put another way, Thurston Howell doesn't start a summer painting business staffed by college students, or a recruiting business which demands 90 hour weeks for the first ten years of life; instead Frank from Gloucester does because he can't stomach the thought of working for someone else for the next 40 years.

<comment><USER7> I'd venture a guess that most of those entrepreneurs aren't taking large risks or going far from the beaten path with their business model. Instead they're setting out to make a living by running a successful HVAC business or restaurant.

Another thing I've observed as a (soon to be former, thank f##king god) MA resident and which has not contradicted what I've observed in VT, NH ME as well as other parts of the Boston/NYC/DC urban+suburban area is that the blue collar business owners (and to a much lesser extent, their employees) directly benefit from serving a wealthy area. Wealthy people hire landscapers, plumbers and mechanics much more readily than less wealthy. The owners of businesses that serve them milk it for every penny of profit (and rightly so).

Don't believe me? Look at the trucks they drive and equipment they use. If it's all on it's last legs then times are tough. With all the people with the money to pay professionals for services times are anything but tough in most of MA

Anyway, my point is that if one plays their cards right, they can do very well (comparable to white collar professionals outside of tech/engineering/financial) by owning a small business. Desire to be an entrepreneur has nothing to do with it, for someone who isn't wealthy in a wealthy area more possible situations where the risk/reward makes owning/starting a business a great strategic decision.

<comment><USER6> Right, and this is precisely what entrepreneurship means in the general case.

Doing a 'startup' is a different thing entirely, and has a far more bimodal outcome curve than what you or I describe.

I think language is helpful, especially because younger HN readers may not know to distinguish the two, and think that advice or statistics about entrepreneurs applies to them when they are aiming at a fast-growth startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > We're in an era of the cult of the entrepreneur. We analyze the Tory Burches > and Evan Spiegels of the world looking for a magic formula or set of > personality traits that lead to success.

No, pop mags like Quartz do. Some entrepreneurs go to trade school and are electricians, deli owners and carpenters. Something like 7%[0] of Americans are self-employed, difficult to believe that many people come from massive wealth.

[0][http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdeta...](http://www.careerbuilder.com/share/aboutus/pressreleasesdetail.aspx?sd=2%2F6%2F2014&id=pr802&ed=12%2F31%2F2014)

<comment><USER9> It's not necessarily about _massive_ wealth. One theory I've heard is that entrepreneurs tend to come from the second wealth tier, not the first. They have resources and fallbacks, but also a strong work ethic and something to strive for. The already rich are less likely to have that particular combination. There are certainly enough people in that "not so massively wealthy" group to support a 7% self-employment rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title is misleading in the extreme: family money is merely one of the available options. You don't have to come from money, you can make your own opportunities by networking, finding investors, and so on.

The 1870 - 1920 industrial revolution era of the US disproves this 'entrepreneurs come from families with money' premise. Most people starting businesses at that time came from relative poverty. That includes JD Rockefeller.

China's boom of the last 30 years also disproves the family money premise. The radical majority of their millions of entrepreneurs over that time did not come from families with money.

</comment><comment><USER11> Click bait title imo - article is much softer. Key takeaway is that people are more willing to take risks if they have something to fall back on, which when said out loud, is pretty much a no brainer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Some people quit their jobs and throw everything into a new, risky venture. This is pretty dangerous, especially for those without wealth. More realistic people work 40-50 hours a week at work and another 40 on their own passions. The smartest find a do-nothing job where they could cash a check for showing up at the office and surfing the net all day (IT, help desk at large organizations) and devote their work time to their own passions.

<comment><USER13> "The smartest find a do-nothing job where they could cash a check for showing up at the office and surfing the net all day (IT, help desk at large organizations) and devote their work time to their own passions."

I guess you can call that smart. But it is also dishonest. They are effectively stealing from their employer. Many people seem fine with that, justifying it with the notion that their employer doesn't adquately utilize their skills, or is stupid to trust them so deserves to be taken advantage of, or didn't know how valuable their IP was so it was ok to take it and start a company around it.

I've known quite a few people who did this, even a couple who went on to found billion dollar companies while on the payroll and using company resources.

<comment><USER14> The employer and employee have an _antagonistic_ relationship.

It's expected that the employer is going to fuck over the employee when it's convenient (you're naive to think otherwise).

You're putting yourself in an unfair (one-sided) position by deciding that you have to behave nicely towards the company.

<comment><USER15> One-sided != antagonistic.

Also, the relationship has at leaast 3 parties: employer, employee, boss.

The employer doesn't know or care about individual employees, but may have a disposition towards or against bulk layoffs in various circumstances.

The boss does know the individual employee, and may personally like or dislike them (in addition to having some impression of their performance level).

The employee just needs to not piss off the boss, and not appear as deadweight (and optionally, impress the boss enough for protection from semi- discretionary layoffs).

Employers will not fuck over employees "just because". They're mostly rational enough to be predictable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article makes little sense. It claims that the average cost to launch a startup is $30k - approximately 1 year of savings for a software engineer working frugally.

The article doesn't even begin to support it's claim that family with money is necessary - at most, it seems one needs a frugal lifestyle and a middle class job.

<comment><USER17> You're forgetting opportunity cost here, which is by far the largest factor.

Say you worked a 9-5 for two years saving up $30k. You reach the end of two years and youre going to quit your job, losing all of your income, and then also spend 100% of your savings right away on beginning some new business that could fail at any point?

You are thinking from the perspective of someone from wealth, missing the realities that would be faced by someone actually considering starting a business without a history of even middle class wealth.

Most businesses are not the kind you can start on your off time, as a side project. You cannot keep your salary, you have no investment income, or passive income of any kind.

What happens when you fail? you've spent every last cent of your savings, you have no job, you have a sizeable gap in your resume, and going back to your old career means youll have to take a pay cut compared to what you were making before you left to start the business.

This is a real fear that keeps many people from going out on their own.

If you are from wealth on the other hand, having no savings might not be as big of a deal. You wont become homeless if you have family and friends that have the means to take you in. You wont go hungry, you can even take a few weeks to reevaluate your decisions and decide if you want to start another business with your lessons learned, or if you should return to the job market and get yourself back on your feet.

<comment><USER16> _You are thinking from the perspective of someone from wealth..._

That's quite a feat, given that I'm not from wealth at all. I've probably got more money than anyone else in my family and I've earned it mainly from salaried employment and personal investments.

The opportunity costs you've described apply equally well to someone who came from wealth - resume gap, time spent not working, no job, etc.

I'm not disputing that startup capital from family would be helpful. I'm disputing the article's implication that the amounts of capital needed are unavailable to regular people, or that only people from wealth _can_ start a business.

<comment><USER17> >I've earned it mainly from salaried employment and personal investments

If investment income is a relevant part of your income stream, then congratulations - you are among the wealthiest and most financially literate of all americans.

You are now someone who speaks from a position of wealth because of this.

>opportunity costs you've described apply equally well to someone who came from wealth

Oh really?

Because when youre poor and your parents live in a one bedroom apartment and cant afford food for an extra person, maybe youve even been sending them money because they have problems keeping up with their bills and being able to eat everyday.

Thats the same as a stanford grad, whose parents live nearby in a 4 bedroom plus house, can easily afford to send their children money when they need it, let alone allowing them to move back home with free room and board at any time.

If you honestly dont see a difference, from the perspective of starting a business, between these two people, then we have nothing further to discuss.

> or that only people from wealth can start a business.

I have yet to see the article or a single commenter make this claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The key concept here is diversification - having more than one source of income. The more of these you have - the less you are affected by risks and market volatility. You have much lower loss-aversion, you could even afford to fail-fast, abandon and start again or just delegate.

The simplest example is a landlord having a running businesses in his basements instead of just collecting a rent. These businesses could be seasonal, habit/passion-driven, barely profitable, etc.

Btw, a rich family doesn't mean lots-of-money-in-the-bank, it usually means many diversified sources of income.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it's more about education - being taught from a young age that entrepreneurship is a possibility and how to manage and make money leads to those people having a higher chance of starting a business.

And of course, families that are relatively well off and don't have to worry about basic needs can afford to teach their children that, while poor parents will most likely teach them to be frugal and that having a safe job and not taking big risks is of upmost importance (or not teach them anything - children will notice anyway).

<comment><USER20> I can't stress this enough. I was a lower middle class kid who grew up with rich kids and seeing HOW other parents made a life made it so I had no question what I wanted to do. I learned from an early age what I could just apologize for and I developed a very high risk tolerance with proper research. I never took a dollar but always found a way to make it work. 2cents

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Counterpoint: 85% of Millionaires are self-made. See the book "The Millionaire Next Door."

<comment><USER22> 85% of the 1500 millionaires interviewed by Fidelity Millionaire Outlook "said" that they where self made.

Still, I would like to know how many of this "self made" millionaires are not white, men, and don't come from a, let's say top 15% tier, wealthy family.

<comment><USER21> The book is by Stanley and Danko, who are not affiliated with Fidelity according to their bio. I would recommend at least skimming the book - <USER2> details how it is done. Wealthy parents are not required.

The book is going for $2.48 on Amazon. Anyone can afford it. Why not give it a try before dismissing it?

<comment><USER23> Well, that was an unnecessary snide remark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My two favorite go to's on the psychology of founders:

[https://www.harrisonmetal.com/](https://www.harrisonmetal.com/)

&&

[http://blakemasters.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels- cs183-...](http://blakemasters.com/post/24578683805/peter-thiels- cs183-startup-class-18-notes)

</comment><comment><USER25> So people are not risking homelessness and being destitute to setup startups after all? That's a good thing.

I think the smartest path for people without financial capital is to spend a decade getting industry experience and getting to know people in whatever field they aspire to disrupt.

</comment><comment><USER26> This was truer in the past when entrepreneurs had to build physical products or lobby for their business through established family connections of power. Today wealth is less required as long as a proper education can be paid for. Entrepreneurs thrive at Harvard, MIT, Caltec, Berkley, and the like... And software has been the social ladder super express. If Microsoft, google, virgin, facebook, instagram, uber, and apple weren't all started by wealthy entreprenuers then this article is refuted, since those are all the companies we emulate.

<comment><USER27> Well, for starters, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Uber and Apple were effectively founded by white, highly educated men. As far as I know, in none of these cases were their families actually poor. Gates came from a straight up wealthy family; Zuckerberg's family is one of doctors and other highly-paid professionals too.

<comment><USER10> Apple's founders came from a middle class background. Paul Allen came from a middle class background. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were also middle class. Larry Ellison was semi-poor. Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen were middle class. Jan Koum was poor. Gordon Moore was middle class. Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner were middle class.

The majority of Americans fall into the same (or better) economic category as those people.

<comment><USER27> Wait. So Paul Allen was friends with a friend from a wealthy family who sent their son to Harvard. He himself attended a private school.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page were PhD students at Stanford...

Marc Cuban was middle class... in an affluent neighborhood known for the quality of its school district. And the dude was a beast of an intellect and was pushed by his family to be entrepreneurial from age 12. Koum got _extremely_ lucky in being in the right place at the right time in what was essentially the app store lottery, not to mention that he seems like an incredibly bright guy.

Honestly, your arguments are not helping. All these people, aside from being white, working on tech and being extremely talented, were in the right place at the right time. I don't doubt that they would have been succesful in other fields since the common theme is that they're also incredibly smart.

But from all these examples I just can't help thinking that if these guys had decided to, for example, go into medicine, civil engineering, or other traditional paths, or if they had been of a different gender things would have been different.

Also, dude, what part of being a PhD student at Stanford doesn't scream a tremendous amount of privilege? Wealth and class are not just a question of the amount of money in the bank, but also being raised in families from highly educated backgrounds, a culture of hard work, a selection of professions that promote entrepreneurial and technical values, the sheer luck of having chosen a field that's expanded exponentially, and also not having to deal with shit like, say, malnutrition, which is a _not uncommon_ theme in the US, where a significant child population lives on food deserts.

Rest assured, I really, really think that if Brin and Page had been to any other university with a not-so-stellar track record of professors being intimately involved in Silicon Valley corporations, they would have been "merely" very good researchers. There's a _ton_ of people who have the skills to study in Stanford, yet for monetary issues, difficult childhoods, and the plain fact that a lot kids have no idea what CS education is about, they never get the chance to be exposed to the people, and most importantly, the money there.

<comment><USER26> All the parent is saying is they were not upper or elite class. You're saying that much of the middle class in the US is privileged enough, and that these people had more going for them than money in the bank, which is the exact opposite of what the article was saying. It was basically saying you had to be rich to be risk-adverse. You don't. You just need enough of a cushion and a support system.

> but also being raised in families from highly educated backgrounds, a > culture of hard work, a selection of professions that promote > entrepreneurial and technical values, the sheer luck of having chosen a > field that's expanded exponentially

None are the result of plain wealth.

<comment><USER27> > None are the result of plain wealth.

But they _are_ a result of class.

You can have people hitting up wealth from very specific opportunities. But the knowledge that comes from being raised from class is how to maintain and further that wealth.

My parents are from the professional middle class, but they never taught me the value of networking, self-promotion, and corporate speak because they never found a use for it. I had to learn it from friends of mine from far more affluent backgrounds, who told me exactly what recruiters look for, what investors look for, how to dress the part and how to talk the part.

That knowledge, concentrated in just two years of meeting these people, has easily made a different of 50% in my income, if not more. And my ceiling is now essentially unlimited because of the access that has given me.

If I hadn't gone to an expensive private school I would have never acquired those social codes which are key to getting funding and interest in the larger public sphere. I am forever grateful for that knowledge, but I'd be naive to say it's something anyone can learn by themselves without prior exposure.

<comment><USER26> Your emphasis is on intellect, not wealth class. Middle class is enough to have access to intellect and nurture it with a top tier education. Obama and Dave Chappelle are also products of middle class intellects raising (dare i say) unicorn children. The original article is bs and your points are not about wealth. Most of the rich are not entrepreneurial. There is no causation let alone correlation. What you are citing is intellect.

As for how to dress and behave, they are far easier to pick up than what makes anyone intrinsically smart. Yourself included, you did not need to be rich for a little "class" to rub off on you. It's like learning proper English. At places like Harvard, it truly does rub off (often along with the Haaavd-ness or MIT-ness etc etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Counterpoints: Rockefeller. Carnegie. Jobs. Several of my entrepreneur friends.

<comment><USER29> "The plural of anecdote is not 'data'."

<comment><USER24> Best comment response ever. It is sad this will languish here rather than be etched into a stele.

<comment><USER30> [http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of- an...](http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2011/04/the-plural-of-anecdote-is- data-after-all.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's not nature (genes), it's not nurture (family), and it's not class (inherited wealth). The entrepreneurial spirit is rooted in free-will and individual creativity. Anybody can do it, if and when they want to.

<comment><USER32> Yep; that's the line pretty much taught by Disney movies. And true it is, but much truer when you have the backup and the contacts that the average wealthy family (not Scrooge McDuck-wealthy, just wealthy) has, just like the real world teaches us every day.

<comment><USER31> Jean-Baptiste Say coined the term. I do believe he predates Walt Disney by quite a bit.

The entrepreneur ventures with a plan to use money in such a way that he will make a profit from his activity. It's simple. It requires an adventurous character, some perceptive understanding of market prices, notions on how to make a profit from productive activity, and the will to act accordingly. The concept was needed because countless people were doing it in the 18th century, under the eyes of those now known as classical economists.

<comment><USER32> Yep; that's the line pretty much taught by Jean-Baptiste Say. And true it is, but much truer when you have the backup and the contacts that the average wealthy family (not Scrooge McDuck-wealthy, just wealthy) has, just like the real world teaches us every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> On top of my mind, I don't think Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison came from families with money.

Give me two billionaires I and you will see they don't have much in common except tenacity, willpower and seeing the world as something they can influence.

I don't think you can learn a lot in analyzing successes, because there are so many different paths to success and chance plays a huge part.

Also, IMHO success is more about what you _don 't_ do than what you do.

But sure helps write articles which drive traffic.

<comment><USER34> > I don't think Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison came from families with money.

Doesn't mean anything. Most bombs aren't nuclear bombs, that doesn't mean there are no nuclear bombs. The fact that a handful of billionaires who were in the IT industry during its formative moments and getting a ground floor opportunity doesn't mean lots on entrepreneurs aren't coming from wealthy families.

<comment><USER10> Forbes has found US billionaires are increasingly coming from middle to lower- upper classes, and are not inheriting their wealth. [1] [2]

It's trivially easy to come up with dozens of examples of people that came from average or poor backgrounds and became billionaires in the last 50 years. Soros, Oprah, Spielberg, Harold Simmons, Howard Schultz, George Lucas, Carl Icahn, Do Won Chang, Bob Parsons, Stephen Bisciotti, Henry Samueli, Jan Koum, J.R. Simplot, Kirk Kerkorian, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Paul Allen, Leon Charney, Mark Cuban, Carl Lindner, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Shahid Khan, George Joseph, Jack Dorsey, Michael Bloomberg, Sheldon Adelson, Phil Knight, Ken Langone, Jack Dangermond, Elon Musk, Ken Langone, Harold Hamm, David Murdock, John Malone, Gordon Moore, Thomas Peterffy, Marc Andreessen, Michael Jordan, Alec Gores, Ralph Lauren, John Paul DeJoria, Kenny Troutt, Alan Gerry, Evan Williams - this list keeps going.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there-a...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/03/there- are-more-self-made-billionaires-in-the-forbes-400-than-ever-before/)

"We crunched the data from our most recent Forbes 400 and discovered that more than 94% of the tech billionaires created their fortunes themselves."

40% of those tech billionaires came from a lower class background. In real estate it's nearly 50%.

[2] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/06/self- ma...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2014/10/06/self-made- billionaires-thrive-in-silicon-valley-and-wall-street-as-manufacturing- suffers/)

<comment><USER34> > It's trivially easy to come up with dozens of examples

It's always easy to come up with small numbers of examples that don't fit a rule, that doesn't disprove a rule, especially when the rule is a generalization and not an absolute. However, if the data says it's actually well over half, THAT disproves the rule, and is a much better way of stating the rule is untrue.

<comment><USER33> Actually one single counter-example can be enough to disprove a rule.

What doesn't work is using an example to prove a rule.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What specific problems you wish someone would solve for you? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Where do I start...Right now at work one problem is: How to quickly and accurately gauge if a job applicant is a fast learner. A solution that included how fast of a learner compared to other applicants, and if possible compared to a broader population too.

Being a fast learner is not the only hiring criteria obviously, but many roles really do need it. Also, while I respect those students who may not be a fast learner but work harder and longer to make up for it - totally commendable and very relevant in school - however once in the workplace some jobs just don't have that extra time.

I could see it having other uses outside the workplace, likewise this might be topic specific eg some people pick up languages very fast (still, a tool for anyone to gauge how quickly it will take them to learn a new language could be helpful before getting fully into it).

Apologies if this exists. If so, please let me know. If not, I know this is a problem many hiring managers have and I think a solution is feasible.I would be willing to pay for it if it does exist. Btw happy to complain more if you're still looking for problems ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure if this is possible already with current vision techniques, but I'd want this following:

I'm a super neat freak. Being able to quantify my "neatness" would be _awesome_. For example, I take a picture of my desk and it'll intermittently take pictures (or maybe live video feed), and then it buzzes or makes a loud sound.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish I knew how to find an occupational psychotherapist who specialised in working with programmers/sysadmins/engineers and who practised either in London or over video/email.

<comment><USER5> RSI?

<comment><USER4> I realize that was unclear. No, I'm talking about psychological issues, probably with some social anxiety on the side.

<comment><USER6> If you don't mind sharing, why do you want somebody that focuses/specializes in developers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish someone would find and sell my products to people for me and not charge me anything.

<comment><USER8> What problem do your products solve?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I realize its a longshot, but if someone can allow me to build a level in a 3D environment by say using an EEG headset (training it so that it knows my patterns for placing walls/etc..) that would be incredible.

</comment><comment><USER10> A service to screen sales people on their ability to actually sell.</comment>


Netflix show 13 Reasons Why associated with 28.9% rise in suicide rates in youth - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/bisiq5/the_netflix_show_13_reasons_why_was_associated/ <comment><USER2> Not to spoil this, but what were the reasons? Are they convincing? Like another commenter said, the show apparently states that "justice in life is not possible" and in my opinion that is rather valid, considering what you can get away with as soon as you attain some sort of arbitrary status, as a high public office or just a lot of wealth.

I don't want to kill myself, because I get more joy out of being a constant thorn in the sides of the corrupt, but as a teenager you may well feel differently. And for good reason. I felt more helpless as a teenager as well and did at times ponder whether a strongly worded suicide note along with suicide would achieve more than anything else I could have done.

That is no longer true, but that still doesn't change that I did experience those feelings.

Isn't it more important to address this than to (as perhaps legislators may try) simply prohibit media that deal with these themes?

See the most recent scandal in the UK where a debate kicked off around whether instagram et al should allow content from people showing off their self-harm, etc...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full title that HN wouldn't allow:

The Netflix show "13 Reasons Why" was associated with a 28.9% increase in suicide rates among U.S. youth ages 10-17 in the month (April 2017) following the shows release, after accounting for ongoing trends in suicide rates, according to a study.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's the press release from NIH.gov:

[https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2019/release- of-1...](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2019/release- of-13-reasons-why-associated-with-increase-in-youth-suicide-rates.shtml)

The study as it appears on the journal's website:

[https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567(19)30288-6/fulltex...](https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567\(19\)30288-6/fulltext)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > many are strongly opposed to the confusing messages in the show (justice in > life is not possible, but kill yourself and you might just get revenge). > Many experts insist that the show glamorizes suicide and may even set off or > increase suicidal ideation in vulnerable teens.

From [0], April 2017

[0]: [https://www.weareteachers.com/problem-with-13-reasons- why/](https://www.weareteachers.com/problem-with-13-reasons-why/)

</comment><comment><USER4> And... that would be about the "social responsibility" of business.

This is clearly a huge social cost. How should a society, government deal with situation like this? How they do right now? (I'm interested in a general view, not only the US, cause they're crazy about "do what you want no matter the social cost")</comment>


Twittmeter - Automatically update your location and activity, right in your avatar - <AUTHOR> http://twittmeter.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> The service should be rolling out soon, but you can take an early look at the functionality on my Twitter handle (@daveambrose): <http://twitter.com/daveambrose>

O: Stands for office M: Mobile Meter graphs: Amount of tweets you send per hour

If you would like to be involved in the beta, leave your email on the page or feel free to ping me.</comment>


You Are What You Eat – And Why You Should Spend More on Higher Quality - <AUTHOR> http://busybuildingthings.tumblr.com/post/79871235525/you-are-what-you-eat-and-why-you-should-spend-more-on

<comment><USER2> I didn't get a sense of justification for spending more to achieve quality from this article. It seemed more focused on habits and pickiness which can lead to (or result from) creativity.</comment>


Snow – Conceal messages in ASCII text (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.darkside.com.au/snow/ <comment><USER2> I made something similar that uses zero width Unicode characters to encode a message.

[https://secretsigner.com](https://secretsigner.com)

<comment><USER3> Since I published my article on ZWC [1] I've been scanning different parts of the net for their use after hearing about their use in Eve Online.

I've found them being used for quite some time, even here on HN. I think spammers are using them to get around spam filters because the context that they're using them for doesn't usually seem like they've been inadvertently fingerprinted. It seems like they're sending the same message over and over again on things like hiring threads for HN. I wish I had more time to dig into it, but there are too many more important things going on right now.

[1] zachaysan.com/zero

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like how the recent changes section has bug fixes from 1998.

</comment><comment><USER5> The manual page mentions that the program has a command that will calculate the "approximate storage capacity of a file", but doesn't really say what that would be. I'm guessing that would turn out to be the limiting factor here—it seems like you'd either need a _really_ long text file, or a _really_ short encrypted message to be able to use this method reliably.

<comment><USER6> I'd guess the idea would be to pass around a copy of Hamlet, the Odyssey, Canterbury Tales, KJV Bible[1], or a similar public domain lengthy and popular work that would, in itself, draw no attention to itself.

For me, the reason I always hesitated to use widespread encryption ahead of mainstream adoption was that standing out as an oddity seemed to pose a greater threat than taking no extraordinary efforts. That is, if I engaged in behavior similar to someone with good reason to hide then I might become a target for scrutiny. My "opsec" wouldn't have been effective for anything beyond casual scrutiny, so my security efforts would have been demonstrably counter-productive[1]. At least that was my logic. A couple examples: as soon as full disk encryption started shipping with Windows, I used it. When choosing between SMS, Hangouts, and iMessage, I'd choose iMessage.

Not saying my logic was sound, but feel confident that it contains at least a degree of truth.

[1] Sort of an all-or-nothing choice. Taking _some_ steps arguably makes you a higher profile requiring consistent security measures taken at every turn.

<comment><USER7> > I'd guess the idea would be to pass around a copy of <snip>

Diffing your copy of Hamlet.txt against a clean copy would reveal the pattern of spaces (ie, the cyphertext), so the security by obscurity (if any) would be easily defeated.

<comment><USER8> First, let me say that encoding bits in whitespace is to Steganography what ROT13 is to Cryptography. Neither has a chance of success against any non- incompetent attacker, but they serve well as simple proofs of concept.

Second, you assume there's one canonical Hamlet.txt to compare against (which there's, if Alice was dumb enough to pick whatever is the first available option in Guthenberg.org as her cover message). For a more sophisticated attack, you must consider how many different editions, reprints, etc, have there been of that work over the centuries. For each of those, you must consider how many possible digitalizations can be obtained for different brands and configurations of scanners.

Then, there's the issue that you must do all of this for every large message that Internet users send to each other...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool in concept, but if you're trying to hide messages in documents that are saved/edited by others, it'll be a crapshoot. Quite a few editors will trim trailing whitespace after saving (Emacs, Vim, and Atom all have the option).

</comment><comment><USER10> I have just tested it with the following procedure: \- Extract some text from a facebook post. \- Put that text in a file (resulting size 1869 bytes) \- Encode a message of 8 bytes on it. Resulting output file size of 1956 bytes. \- Copy the output to a new FB post. \- Extract the text from the new FB post. \- Found that FB removes all added whitespace and the size of the copied text is exactly the initial one: 1869 bytes

So I cannot use it :D

<comment><USER4> It's easy. Just don't use Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the logo, which is a polar bear in a snowstorm.

<comment><USER12> where's the polar bear's nose then?

<comment><USER7> He's looking away from the camera so it's obscured by his head

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a text watermarking program with a suspiciously similar name:

[http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/soft/snowdrop.tgz](http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/soft/snowdrop.tgz)

<comment><USER14> Whitespace (as in the SNOW technique) is one of the channels Snowdrop uses to conceal its watermark, but not the only one-- for English text, it also introduces typos, changes punctuation marks, and replaces some words with synonyms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I made a simple web app similar to this a while back: [https://www.chaoswebs.net/snow10/](https://www.chaoswebs.net/snow10/)

</comment><comment> forgot-my-pw Any tracking solution works best for parts of PDF that often gets screenshotted and reposted?</comment>


Ask HN: What's your experience with async standups? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Depends what you mean by standups, if you are talking about a status meeting it probably works for most teams.

If you are talking about Scrum though, a stand up should be an opportunity for the team to assess where they are at in the sprint. Then discuss what they need to do to achieve the goal and make a plan for the day that puts them on the right path. Doing this asynchronously is a pain.

</comment><comment><USER3> We do them. Seems to accomplish the goal. It's better for reflecting and less oppressive to be there at the same time every morning. Make it mandatory, talk about intentions for the day, blockers and PRs that need reviewing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! If you dont mind me asking, do you use any specific software for that? Also, do you have people in different timezones?

<comment><USER3> We only have one timezone so we haven't had to deal with that yet. We just have a scheduler job send the email to everyone prompting them.</comment></comment></comment>


Study finds flaw in emergent gravity (phys.org) - <AUTHOR> https://phys-org.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/phys.org/news/2018-08-flaw-emergent-gravity.amp?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&usqp=mq331AQHCAFYAYABAQ%3D%3D#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fphys.org%2Fnews%2F2018-08-flaw-emergent-gravity.html <comment><USER2> > "Emergent gravity has very strong claims: that it can explain things like > dark matter and dark energy, but also reproduce the decades of work coming > out of regular general relativity,"

But no effort is made to check if emergent gravity can explain the motion of a falling stone. I would think that a proposed theory should start by explaining the trivial and the obvious and if it can explain these then it can be tried in more esoteric problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity#Derivation_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity#Derivation_of_the_law_of_gravitation)</comment></comment>