Insufficient Sleep Is a Public Health Epidemic - <AUTHOR> http://www.cdc.gov/features/dssleep/ <comment><USER2> Having just been officially diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea today, let me tell you why that part of insufficient sleep is an epidemic: the system is a _racket_. Here are the steps to get your sleep apnea solved:

1\. Go to your GP and have them refer you to a sleep specialist.

2\. Make an appointment with the sleep specialist (one major clinic here in the Bay Area is booked out weeks in advance). Do that office visit where you get the prescription for an overnight sleep study.

3\. Wait 2-3 more weeks for your sleep study date, where you get wired up like you're joining the Matrix, and then told to go to sleep at 9:30pm. Riiight.

4\. Have a follow up visit at the office in step 2. Go over results. Possibly get prescribed a CPAP machine.

5\. Find an in-network provider to buy the CPAP from, and make an appointment with _them_. This is not an off the shelf thing, expect to spend 2-3 hours in the office/store. Wait time: a couple days to a couple weeks.

6\. (optional, if the study from step 3 wasn't split-phase) Return for another sleep study with your new machine so they can calibrate it.

7\. Make another follow up appointment to have the doc look at the report from step 6 and actually perform the calibration.

Dude, WHO HAS TIME FOR THIS? Ironically, this whole process is a bit of a nightmare.

<comment><USER3> You missed one of the most important steps for most people with sleep apnoea: lose some weight.

Most people with sleep apnoea are not helpless victims to an incurable disease. Losing weight doesn't appear to be easy, but it's certainly achievable for most overweight people.

EDIT: Here's the CDC page listing obesity as a cause for apnea [http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html](http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html)

<comment><USER4> Why did you deem it necessary to even mention that?

I'm quite certain that people with sleep apnoea for whom weight is a relevant component are quite aware of that. Yours is just a pointless diversion in this context – because what exactly is the your angle here?

Should it be hard for people with sleep apnoea to get treatment? I mean, what are you arguing here for exactly?

<comment><USER3> People are complaining about the length of time it takes to get treatment, and the cost of treatment, and that treatment is a racket.

All that stuff is true. All that stuff is avoided by losing weight.

Your comment appears to be overly sensitive to a calm, non-judgemental bit of information.

EDIT: Here's the link to the CDC page which lists overweight as a cause of sleep apnea: [http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html](http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/effects/index.html)

It's really easy for people, especially men, to hit a BMI of 30 and not realise that they are obese. Especially in obesogenic societies where very many people are obese, morbidly obese or even super obese. This carries a range of health risks, most of which are helped by losing weight.

It's weird the source article doesn't mention weight, since it is caused by lack of sleep (especially in children and young people) and causes lack of sleep (in adults).

[http://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/chronic_disease.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/chronic_disease.htm)

> Laboratory research has found that short sleep duration results in metabolic > changes that may be linked to obesity. Epidemiologic studies conducted in > the community have also revealed an association between short sleep duration > and excess body weight. This association has been reported in all age > groups—but has been particularly pronounced in children. It is believed that > sleep in childhood and adolescence is particularly important for brain > development and that insufficient sleep in youngsters may adversely affect > the function of a region of the brain known as the hypothalamus, which > regulates appetite and the expenditure of energy

<comment><USER5> _> People are complaining about the length of time (...) All that stuff is avoided by losing weight._

I strongly disagree on the point of time. It is important to realize how slow actual weight loss is. By my naive googling, losing 1kg of fat per week will require quite a lot of calorie restriction, and it is not achievable easily. If you are say 20kg overweight, you will need at least 20 weeks to lose that weight, likely more as nobody is perfect and stress factors here as well.

I am stressing this point as I would like to encourage anyone who suffers from sleep apnea to start both treatment and losing weight. Telling yourself "I don't have to seek treatment, I'll just lose weight" may lead you into several weeks of diminished productivity (as a PhD student with apnea, when not getting enough sleep my scientific productivity is close to zero).

I am not claiming any of the original commenters suggest this, but still: "I'll just suffer until I lose enough weight" is a terrible decision.

<comment><USER3> > It is important to realize how slow actual weight loss is

That's a good point.

> I am not claiming any of the original commenters suggest this, but still: > "I'll just suffer until I lose enough weight" is a terrible decision.

Well, yes, but treatment will change as weight changes. Why go through risky surgery if weight loss might help? Why go through the hassle of sleep studies and waiting for machine fitting if weightloss will help? The alternative to weightloss is not "instant cure", there's still time delays built in.

<comment><USER6> Worst case it doesn't help your sleep and only improves the other million things that being overweight is bad for. Darn.

/working on it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm shocked that they don't mention sitting in front of the computer or TV before bedtime. Computer monitors and TVs have a bluish light. Blue light down-regulates melatonin, which is the hormone that makes you sleepy.

I used to have a serious acne problem. Cutting down on meat and dairy really helped, but I was still getting a few small pimples now and then after that. It was only when I stopped using my computer or TV late in the evening that I got 100% clear skin.

<comment><USER8> Does blue light affect the skin ?

<comment><USER9> Yes, via melatonin

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1317110/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1317110/)

<comment><USER10> Artificial blue light does not contain UV light, and does not influence melatonin.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't matter whether the light is artificial or not. If the wavelength is about 470 nm (blue), it will suppress melatonin. There's been done many experiments/studies on this - here are a few:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11763987](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11763987)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14962066](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14962066)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20463367](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20463367)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22850476](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22850476)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19444752](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19444752)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20652045](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20652045)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anyone here has trouble falling asleep, I have two hacks I've recently implemented that have reduced my TTFA (time to fall asleep) from over two hours to about 15 minutes:

1\. Don't look at a screen for an hour before going to bed.

2\. Wear a sleep mask. If you can open your eyes and see any sliver of light or a distinguishable shape, you need something different.

The effect is complete lack of visual stimulus making it really easy to start hallucinating (an overly strong word) which is an easy ramp into deeper sleep. The lack of bright blue light beforehand does something something melatonin, and you'll feel significantly more tired before bed (the lack of stimulus will also help).

<comment><USER12> Do you think something like f-lux would help for reducing blue light and can be replacement for not seing screen at all?

<comment><USER13> Flux definitely helps me, but it is always better to just read a book an hour before bed :)

<comment> atom-morgan Same. It helps but there's no replacement for no screen time before bed.

<comment><USER13> But...so...hard..!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I miss "Job-caused sleep deprivation" aka "what happens when you have to work 2 jobs+care for a child" to pay rent.

<comment><USER15> It's like you people have never heard of bootstraps. When _I_ was down on my luck, I worked hard and created _my own opportunities_. Now I sleep 10 hours a night.

I never got help from anyone but myself and _my huge trust fund_.

<comment><USER16> Not everyone can do that. Some people also have to actually plant the corn for your food, fix the plumbing, etc. Imagine them all creating their own opportunities instead. Thanks to industrialization and automation it surely would be possible for them to work half their current hours and get more sleep (with more people required to work in those kind of jobs), but somehow this isn't what's happening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've always thought of sleep from a libertarian perspective. For the most part, it's your choice how much you sleep. Yeah, some people have trouble sleeping... but that's largely a result of individual choices. Factors like lack of exercise, too much caffeine, and poor diet all collude to reduce quality of sleep. In that sense, insufficient sleep is a public health epidemic in the same way as obesity. Lots of people are affected by it, but it's still avoidable with proper preparation and habits.

Everybody knows you should get 8-9 hours of sleep per night, and most people are at least vaguely familiar with studies that say lack of sleep can reduce life expectancy. Yet people still choose to sleep less than the optimal amount. That's a _choice._ There is a tradeoff of time now, vs time at age 70+. If time now is more valuable, then it could be rational to sacrifice time at 70+ by sleeping less now. People make this choice every day, subconsciously or not.

Of course, the choice of how much sleep to get is often not an easy one. We have to go to school or work. We have obligations. Perhaps the easiest win from a public health perspective would be changing the start time of public high schools. Why are we forcing kids to wake up at 6am to go to school? That's just stupid, and flies in the face of all sorts of research.

<comment><USER18> > Everybody knows you should get 8-9 hours of sleep per night

I'm with you on health choices and quality of sleep, but I've never needed more than 6-7 hours in the rack.

> The National Institutes of Health suggests that school-age children need at > least 10 hours of sleep daily, teens need 9-105 hours, and adults need 7-8 > hours.

According to the article 7-8 for adults is normal.

<comment><USER19> >teens need 9-105 hours

Sounds about right...

<comment><USER20> I don't know, 9 seems a bit on the low end. From watching relatives grow up, the teenage years seems to be where bad sleep habits start in many cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's not a huge sample set to draw from but the average amount of sleep across all of our Exist[1] users is 6:56 (as tracked by a device like a Fitbit, Jawbone UP, etc). So not quite as bad as in the article, but not quite enough either.

[1]: [https://exist.io](https://exist.io)

<comment> jay-saint Do you think think that your user base is a little more health aware than the average population? I would expect that someone using your site is going to be more self aware, affluent and health conscious than the average that the CDC is polling. For example, how many single hispanic mothers or black senior citizens use exist.io?

<comment><USER21> Though I can't back it up with data, I'm sure you're correct! Plus I suspect most of our small user base is early adopters who of course tend to be younger, affluent, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very important to get your sleep. I recommend no caffeine 4 hours before bed. It seems like everytime I can't fall asleep its because I accidentally drank caffeine. I sleep 6 to 10 hours weirdly enough. It seems to depend largely on the previous nights sleep and the physical exertion I've done in the day.

<comment><USER23> Not everybody is the same. Caffeine has zero effect on my sleep: I often drink a cup of coffee before going to bed. Or have a can of Red Bull (I drink it for the taste, not for some energising properties which have no effect on me).

<comment><USER24> Just because you're not aware of it doesn't mean that it's not affecting you.

<comment><USER25> People often refer to having a cup of coffee to "wake up" or stay awake/alert. I'm sure physiologically caffeine is doing _something_ but I am in the same boat as him, I can drink caffeine and it never keeps me awake.

Back in Lan Party days pounding red bull after red bull I was still easily the first one to bed by far (which is never a good thing to be asleep around a bunch of wired up young immature males late at night...)

<comment> david-given I don't feel like I've woken up properly in the morning until I've had a cup of coffee.

...of course, sometimes I will get up early, do some stuff around the house, drive to the shops, drive back to the house, put everything away, cycle to work, and I _still_ won't feel like I've woken up properly until I've drunk my coffee and read my email.

For me, it's all about the ritual of drinking the coffee rather than the caffeine content. I'm quite sure that if someone were to replace it with decaf and not tell me, it'd work just as well.

Everyone's different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> sometimes I feel like an alien when I say that I need 8-9 hours sleep to feel awake the whole day. 6h seems to be normal nowadays.

Can I train to sleep (a little bit) less?

<comment><USER27> No, but you can train to remember that eight hours is normal; it's the people who think six hours is normal - or rather, the ideology they've bought into - that's alien.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As someone who went to a university where "sleep is for the weak" was a slogan among undergrads, I want to go back in time and throw chalk at anyone who says that.

<comment><USER29> "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There is this IndieGogo project for a mini sleep apnea mask, if anyone is interested: [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/airing-the-first- hoseless...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/airing-the-first-hoseless- maskless-micro-cpap)

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash I would be interested in hearing the opinion of startup employees who were not a part of the early team (yardstick: <1% equity/options) and what their company's attitudes are about proper sleep and work-life balance.

</comment><comment><USER31> ep·i·dem·ic ˌepəˈdemik/ noun 1\. a widespread occurrence of an INFECTIOUS DISEASE in a community at a particular time.

<comment><USER32> Did you just Google this and forget to click down arrow for "more definitions"?

That should lead you to something like this: "a sudden, widespread occurrence of a particular undesirable phenomenon."

Also look up Epidemiology, which studies all manner of health based topics, sleep being one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> When disease - like sleep disruption - spreads rapidly across a large area with no apparent vector, look for a common change in environment. For example, ambient RF has increased to 1000000000000000000 times natural background levels over short period. Who is John Snow?

<comment><USER34> Social organization and interaction are an obvious vector that has changed over time.

<comment><USER33> to anywhere near the power of 10^18?

<comment><USER34> I was disputing your claim that there is "no apparent vector". Which is why I labeled changes to society an obvious vector.

If your proposed RF interference model has a factor of ~10^-19 in it, then a competing social interaction model that has a factor of 1 in it would have a much stronger effect, even if social interaction has only changed to the power of 10^0.1.

So the point there is that the magnitude of the change in the environment is not sufficient information to do a comparison, you also need some sort of explanatory model.

<comment><USER33> so how do you propose to measure this "social interaction" model? And are you really, seriously, running the "no mechanism" claim about RF induced bioeffects?

<comment><USER33> @maverickson: this just in: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26151230)

<comment><USER34> I guess you misunderstand what I mean by an explanatory model.

It would be something like:

      sleep deprivation=(x*RF intensity)+A Constant.

Without x, we have no idea how relevant the 10^18 is to the problem.

So I'm not demanding a theory demonstrating that RF can influence biology, just pointing out that the magnitude of the change in RF is insufficient information to draw a conclusion from.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm considering taking over my family's business and need advice - <AUTHOR>

HN, I need some advice, but first I must give a bit of a back story. Apologies if it is a bit long.  I'm also posting this from a throwaway account for privacy reasons, but I am an avid HNer and greatly respect the advice that so many people give freely within the community. If anyone thinks they have particularly good insights into this situation and would be willing to take some time to chat please send me a message at email@example.com
In 1996 my dad sold his shares of a software product and used the money to bootstrap the development of a business software application in a field that barely existed at the time, but has exploded since then.  Here are some relevant facts about the business 15 years later:
- Enterprise SaaS application
- Annual revenue in the mid to high 6 figures. - Five employees counting both of my parents (my mom is the other co-founder of the business) - Located in a small city in a rural state - Global clientele
- 80% of revenue comes from one client
The company was able to quickly attract a large international client as their first customer.  This was mainly because at the time they were probably one of only two or three companies doing what they do (now there probably at least 20 companies in the same market, and there is still huge room for growth). However, the company has never been able to scale, and while they have had dozens of small clients over the past 10 years they have not been able to attract another large client like their first one.  I believe this happened for two reasons:
1. The company lacks a dedicated sales force. My parents, who are two of the busiest people I know (for reasons unrelated to the business), have managed all clients and sales. Also the company had no active marketing efforts until the last year (most new customers were referrals or obtained by being a subcontractor on larger bids).
2. The software serves a very specific need, and solves a very real problem very well. However, as the company has progressed the software has suffered from bloat and code rot. With only two part-time developers this has meant it has been very difficult to actually improve upon the core product, move it to one platform (currently strung out between .NET and some custom stuff written back in the late 90's.), and build the new features that customers have expressed interest in.  This is partially an engineering failure, and partially a question of where to allocate resources. For example, both of the developers spend a significant portion of their time writing custom code for clients who want things done slightly differently. This is great for revenue, but means the core product suffers.
Now a few relevant facts about me:
- Late 20's - Bachelor of science, but didn't start coding until about two years ago - Founded a start-up that has about 12,000 active users, but has never made the leap to anything beyond ramen profitable. - Extremely passionate about entrepreneurship and determined to run my own company - Never built B2B software, but have more of an interest in B2B than B2C - Live in Seattle
I'm in a bit of a transition phase right now and one of my options is to start working for the company full-time with a plan to transition to running the company in the next 3-5 years. I should also mention that I have sat on the company's BoD since turning 21 and have worked for the company off and on since high school (before the company sold their software as a web-service they we used to order dozens of servers at a time, and I would install the software and run a few tests and then package the servers up to ship them to clients). However, I've never worked on developing the core software product.
If I were to join the company the immediate focus would be on significantly upgrading their application, which probably means rewriting the vast majority of it.  However, as I mentioned before I am a junior developer and harbor no illusions about the complexity of this software. Ideally we would like to hire an additional full-time developer to really lead the rebuild.  Personally, I would even like to explore going one step further and make this hire a CTO (offering them equity in the company).
The company has been profitable from the very beginning, but does not generate the revenue necessary to bring on two extra full time employees (myself and another developer), plus the extra costs associated with having a second office (ideally just a co-working space) and redesigning the software package.  My back-of-the-napkin estimates are that the company needs an extra $150,000/year over three years to fund the transition (the idea is that over 3-5 years the company would transition to being entirely based in Seattle).
My parents are understandably risk averse at this point and don't want to put too much of their own money back into the company at this point.  So my questions for you HN are:
1. First and foremost I'd love to hear opinions - great opportunity or a recipe for disaster?
2. Is it naive to think that rebuilding this software package would make it more attractive to the sort of audience that buys software for $X00,000 dollars?  Spending time with our current customers and really understanding how they use our software, what features they absolutely need, and which they could do without would be a key part of the rebuild. But, how do I turn that into a "guarantee" that new customers will be attracted to the end product?
3. How would one raise money for a company at this stage?  It's not a startup, but it needs the sort of early stage investment that a startup needs.
4. Are there incubators for companies that are at this stage? Any other suggestions for finding mentoring and guidance?
Thank you HN I sincerely value your feedback. <comment><USER2> Cool, congratulations!!

1) For existing software a total rewrite is extremely risky and will most likely fail or cost significantly more than you are prepared to spend. Rewrite portions of it instead and modularize it.

2) The biggest problem you have is that large companies have very different needs than small companies. As a small company you simply cant have both. Enterprise clients need things done exactly how they need them done. Small clients dont want to pay for features they dont need.

3) marketing generates leads - you may not have a sales problem it may be a marketing problem. Do you go to shows? Mailing list? advertising? etc You have a sales problem if you are not able to convert leads to sales.

4) I sell exclusively to fortune 1000 clients and I can tell you they are a pain in the ass and will suck your morale dry. We recently have gotten two mid market companies (500M revenue) and they are simply a pleasure to work with. The elephants are great because they can dependably generate > 2M in business for us each year, but they will steal your soul.

5) 80% of your revenue in a single client is probably the single biggest risk you have. You need to get under 25%.

\</comment><comment>--- We do strategic planning each year and we decide on the major initiatives based on that.

It goes something like this ---> What are the biggest business objectives for the company -->what are the problems keeping us from achieving those -->what are the specific changes we need to implement --> how do we tell if we were successful?

In your case it might look something like 80% of or revenue comes from a single client (huge red flag)-> what is preventing us from increasing our revenue?

Above you had said a few different things as being possible problems. You may want it to be that the code is bad, but if that really isnt the issue, then fixing the code wont get you more revenue. I think it is probably a lack of understanding of who your customer really is and what they need. Once you decide, then you can implement specific changes to make it happen. Those changes most likely will include determining how to reach those people then running campaigns to reach them. Once you reach them you can find out why they arent buying, then you can begin making changes to the code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate this.

1) I totally hear you on this. I was wondering what sort of response this would get. The goal is definitely to rewrite in portions. However, we've been trying to do exactly this for the past couple of years and it has been really slow going (because of the reasons I listed in the post). It seems to me that at least one more full time developer is really needed right now to make this happen.

2) Yup. That's one of the biggest challenges. Every customer needs something slightly different. I have few ideas in mind that would make the software more flexible so that custom work would eat up less development time. Again though...this means a big investment in the software.

3) That's a good question. Marketing has been pretty non-existent in the company. That said, we probably respond to 10 or so RFPs per year. We usually win a couple of those, but the bigger companies (Fortune 10000) have been passing us over. The questions this raises are 1) is this because of the software, or 2) is it because no one has hopped on a plane and flown out to meet with them and held their hand through the process (i.e. sales). I'm not sure what the answer to these questions are, but it's prob a good place to start.

5) Yes. Everyone is 100% agreed on this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1\. So the business already does mid to high 6 figures. But is there scope to increase it to a 50 million or even a 500 million $ company? Without knowing more about the industry, we can't answer that. But you need to find that out.

2\. The 2 problems you are facing right now is: the code need major revamping. A dedicated sales person is needed.

Because of your background, you seem to be putting emphasis on fixing the code first. Forget that. Make sales the priority. Join as a salesman and try drumming up new sales for the next 3 months. Without putting effort in revamping the code. This will show you:

i. If the demand is actually there in the market

ii. What features are essential and what are not

iii. And if you can drum up new sales, this will give you the money that can be used to fix the code.

3\. One client is invoiced about half a million $ a year. This client is an awesome company to bring on board as a partner. Get this client to fund future expansions. Either by pre-paying you for getting discount in price for the next year or 3. Or by giving you a loan. Or by taking an equity stake in the company itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the input.

1\. Yes, there is a ton of room for the company to grow (market is young and expanding rapidly).

2\. I definitely can see the logic in making sales a priority. I have absolutely no experience selling to businesses, and would be happy to jump in the deep end. However, I don't know how you actually sell to large corporations. In the past we have just waited for RFPs to come to us. Any suggestions on how to actually pound the concrete looking for clients?

3\. Good suggestion. Unfortunately not applicable in this situation.

<comment><USER2> We really dislike RFPs. Usually RFPs are a procurement requirement and the team has already decided on a solution. Typically they will be worded to favor the incumbent. We have never won an RFP, but that may be because we suck :)

Im not that good with inbound marketing, but we have been improving over the last few years. To get sales, people who are looking have to be able to find you. These days that means email campaigns, blog, SEO, adwords and conferences. Go to conferences and use them to start building a mailing list, before the conference identify who you want to meet and try to setup meetings beforehand.

Personally I hate all that and in my startup Im trying to do pure inbound marketing via SEO, blog etc.

Selling to large corps is hard, read spin selling and getting to yes for once you get in. The getting in is hard and the sales cycles are long. Basically you have to find someone that acts as a toehold to get you in and keep get referrals to eventually find the person who wants what you sell within the company.

If there is one thing I would recommend, that is go after small to medium businesses instead. they have their own issues, but you will have small dollars from a large number of companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've worked for a brief period with family before and it can quickly become a complicated situation.

A few words of wisdom from my experience:

1) Establish what your role is and what aspects of the company you control:

Just because it's your family, doesn't mean you'll suddenly get a lot of control. When I was brought on as a Operations Manager I thought I had a lot of freedom to control how things operated. However, I quickly realized that my parents and their business partners still saw me as an employee rather than a strategic partner. Making this clear up front and observe how they react when you offer strategic solutions. Do they brush you off or do they act on it?

2) What are realistic contributions you can make to the company and do they align with your goals?

Your comments about your parent's hesitancy to put additional money into the company means you'll have to fight to hire a developer and update the core product. If you lose this fight, what other opportunities do you see in the company? If you don't see any, then it's probably better to move on and find a project where you have either more control, or more options.

Hope this helps.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just my 2 cents (not meant to be an 'answer' at all...).

If you're passionate about business & entrepreneurship I'd say you'd be the perfect person to take your parents' business to the next level. Look at what Gary Vaynerchuk did with his parents' wine business...

Are your parents both taking full time salaries? Are they willing to transition out of the business to allow for increased salary expenses?

Also, if you have any ambitions to become wealthy DON'T give away share options/ownership of the company unless you absolutely have to. I'd suggest working for nothing if it meant you could retain ownership and survive off your ramen profitable start up...

</comment><comment><USER6> Conventional wisdom says that complete code rewrites are almost always a bad idea. Joel has some great essays on this from several years back.

Developers that have not tackled a big rewrite tend to believe they are the exception to this rule (I believed I was).

After tackling a major rewrite most discover why it is called 'conventional' wisdom. I won't volunteer for it again (on a several hundred thousand line code base).

However bad your code appears, and if it is generating significant revenue then it probably isn't _that_ bad, you almost certainly can refactor it step by step. Yes, it may take a while, but it is manageable!

</comment><comment><USER7> Are your parents going to be ok with letting you do things differently? Are you ok with the transition not taking 5 years but 10 years? What do your parents expect from you? What do you expect?</comment>


A $1 CEO isn't a bargain  - <AUTHOR> http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/01/a-1-ceo-isn%E2%80%99t-a-bargain/ <comment><USER2> American companies that are public are so short termed minded — very few can afford to take the long term view. What the $1 CEO does is it allows the CEO to really take the long view and worry less about shareholders and the board. My only problem is that this limits the role of CEO to rich guys. By the way if you want a proof of concept that this idea works look at Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple.</comment>


The game of life emulated in the game of life - <AUTHOR> http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/05/turtles-all-the-way-down-or-gliders-or-glider-turtles/ <comment><USER3> _The presence or absence of the eater indicates whether the cell should be on in the next meta-generation. The state of the eater is read by the collision of two antiparallel LWSSes, which radiates two antiparallel gliders (not unlike an electron-positron reaction in a PET scanner). These gliders then collide into beehives, which are restored by a passing LWSS in Brice's elegant honeybit reaction._

Reading Game of Life descriptions feels like reading papers about quantum physics :)

<comment><USER4> _Reading Game of Life descriptions feels like reading papers about quantum physics :)_

Which creates some disturbing ideas about _our_ reality.

<comment><USER5> When discussing the idea that our universe is simulated, often the assumption is that it's an experiment by aliens or somesuch. But recently I've started to wonder if our parent universe is nearly identical to our own, and we are one of millions of virtual Earths used for political and economic predictions, because if (when) we could, that's exactly what we would do.

<comment><USER6> If true, this has an interesting implication - if our parent universe bothers to do it, it probably means they get useful information from it. That means that the recursion eventually terminates, that eventually in some great great grandchild universe they are able to produce the seed of the answer to whatever the original question was, rather than start another simulation.

<comment><USER7> My intuition is that the recursion shouldn't hurt getting useful results, even if the simulation was allowed to proceed past the point where such a simulation was developed (which they may not have), in a manner akin to the resolution of Zeno's Paradox. Though there's likely a bound on how many layers deep we can go, but my quantum information theory isn't what it used to be so I have to hand wave my conjectures.

<comment><USER8> > Though there's likely a bound on how many layers deep we can go

Yes. The universe only has so much computing power, and any universe we simulate will have less.

<comment><USER9> Does this depend on the universe having a finite amount of mass or what?

<comment><USER10> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound>

<comment><USER9> Thanks. Any recommended books for a soft introduction to these concepts?

<comment><USER7> Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd (physics professor at MIT who likes to call himself a "quantum mechanic").

Here's a relevant paper by Lloyd titled "Ultimate physical limits to computation": <http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908043v3>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think GoL unit cells <http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Unit_cell> like this demonstrate an important point. That there's certain limitations to our knowledge of reality.

Imagine an intelligent being in a GoL board, made of a huge pattern of cells (just like we're made of a huge number of atoms).

Even though when we look at a GoL board, we know it's made up of cells and that everything operates according to a fixed number of rules, this intelligent being wouldn't just be able to know this. It's perceptual system would be made of these elements (perhaps it somehow uses spaceships to find out about what is out there). Remember that you can't just "see" reality - <USER2> need inputs and to infer what's out there on the basis of them. The sort of view of its reality it could infer would be much more coarsely grained than at the level of individual cells, just as our unaided view of reality is much more coarsely grained than the level of individual atoms.

That intelligent GoL being could observe the way things behave and, on the basis of this, theorise the GoL rules - that everything was a bunch of cells, and that if there's an empty cell and it has three neighbours then that cell will be 'on' in the next moment, and so forth.

And if it existed in a 'standard' Game of Life board, it would have theorised correctly. But if it lived in a Game of Life board where each of the cells it has posited is actually one of these unit cells like in the linked page, then there would be a deeper reality than it realises (and of course there could be 'deeper levels' within that).

There's no way that GoL being could tell.

<comment><USER12> Generalized: There's no way to know which Turing Complete substrate we are "truly" running on. We can examine the parameters of our system and hypothesize which rules are the most parsimonious to produce the system we live in in the Occam's Razor sense, but we can't prove it.

<comment><USER13> How about triggering a buffer overflow? Assuming the Turing Complete substrate doesn't have infinite memory, maybe we can break out ;)

<comment><USER12> The idea has been explored in "the literature", which in this case is a _really_ fancy-pants way of saying "science fiction". In the general case, since we can't figure out what the consequences of a crash are, I don't think I'd recommend it, but if we can get specifics, who knows?

One easily-linked example: <http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It is completely unsurprising that this is possible - GoL is turing complete and obviously we can run GoL on turing equivalent systems.

It is really awesome that someone was able to do the attendant engineering work.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'll go get the mop to clean up the pieces of my brain that are now all over the floor.

After spending some time before reading up on the Game of Life, I'm amazed by this meta implementation.

By the way, why not go on and on recursively?

<comment><USER16> According to the wikipedia link(<http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel>), each meta cell has 64691 actual cells. So to do a 100x100 grid once is 646,910,000 bits, or about 77 mb of storage at one bit per cell[1]. To do a 100x100 grid recursively just once would be 4.75 _peta_ -bytes. Each cell would also have to be touched at least once per frame, so without even getting into drawing the damn thing we're talking about super computer levels of processing power.

[1] Unless you cheat by taking advantage of the fact that most of the cells are just repeats of each other. But cheating doesn't seem anywhere near as awesome.

edit--- That was actually a gross underestimation. The bounding box on the meta pixels is 4235364 cells, or about 65 times as many I said. So it's about 4.9 GB to do a 100x100 grid without any recursion. It's 643 zetabytes (2^70) to do it recursively once. It kind of makes me think that whoever did the video might have cheated even for that small animation.

<comment><USER17> "Cheating" by taking advantage of repetition is exactly how Bill Gosper's famous "HashLife" implementation handles really huge universes.

Here's my implementation in CoffeeScript, written in the "Williams Style:"

<http://recursiveuniver.se>

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I realized as I was typing it out that there must be "cheating" going on. After all, 99% of computer science is finding ways to "cheat".

<comment><USER18> Wherein cheating is a fun word for optimizing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Simply amazing. I hadn't heard about "Life enthusiasts" until reading the linked articles in the post. The OTCA metapixel (<http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel>) is what allows this to work.

I bet Dwarf Fortress and Life enthusiasts would get along.

</comment><comment><USER20> Regarding the movie -- to show the 3rd level just as well, camera should pan out to include the programmer ;-)

</comment><comment><USER21> It should be possible to make a closed loop video. When you zoom out to the full meta level it is exactly the same as the initial frame of the movie. Then the whole thing can be looped seamless forever, as you zoom out to meta-meta- meta levels.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yo Dawg! But more seriously, is that carefully arranged structure required for it to work as shown? It seems a slight variation would cause it to evolve into disarray.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course it has to be precise to the cell.

The basic building block is the OTCA Metapixel <http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel>

<comment><USER23> Yeah, add one pixel in the wrong place and the thing would implode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Also interesting to nerds like me is that the annoying audio in the video is a seemingly always-increasing tone called a Shepard Tone:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone>

 _edit:_ …and now reading that I've stumbled across the Tritone paradox which I wasn't familiar with and is equally cool.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone_paradox> <http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=206>

</comment><comment><USER25> There even is a 3D version of the SmoothLife algorithm out there: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxaOnOVGepI>

Very very cool stuff!

<comment><USER26> Interesting! It reminds me a little bit of a lava lamp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nah.. I better wait for the game of life emulated in the game of life emulated in the game of life..

Sorry.. I was forced at a gunpoint to do that..

<comment><USER28> At which level do you mean this game? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(board_game)>

;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The size of the field, is it fixed or growing? I guess, if it is fixed, this implementation still needs some work...

Either way, I think that Turing Machine with infinitely growing stacks [see <http://rendell-attic.org/gol/fullutm/index.htm>] is a way cooler.

</comment><comment><USER30> My favorite thing to do with metacells is to destroy a small part of one of them and watch the chaos. Digital cancer.

<comment><USER31> This was surprisingly fun to do. Adding just one cell in the right place destroyed the whole metagame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Bizarre / incredible timing. I just created an interactive D3.js implementation of Conway's Game of Life yesterday: <http://boydgreenfield.com/conwayjs/>

Would love to hear peoples' thoughts...

(And sorry for the promotion)

<comment><USER33> Nice job. I think some good next steps would be speed controls and the ability to draw/erase by clicking and dragging.

<comment><USER32> Indeed. Definitely on the list. (And thanks!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That background sound is annoying...

<comment><USER35> It's the Shepard–Risset glissando, for what it's worth: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone>

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6aP9S9rEQk> — all the way down

</comment><comment><USER37> Save yourself and mute the video.

</comment><comment><USER38> If you also implemented it on other GOL variants (pentagonal, hexagonal, multicolored) it would be a virtual machine.

Makes me want to build a compiler back-end for one of the GOL turing machines.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm gonna wake up and get flushed out a sewer pipe, aren't I?

</comment><comment><USER40> Here is the video that inspired this one: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtJ77qsLrpw>

</comment><comment><USER41> Amazing... I'm old enough (sigh) to remember reading about Life in a Martin Gardner column 40 years ago and playing it on a piece of graph paper.

</comment><comment><USER42> I never quite get the excitement over game of life (is emergent behaviour really that surprising?), but this is extremely impressive.

</comment><comment><USER43> <http://golly.sourceforge.net/></comment>


Call Pest Control: The Bug Problem at the US Embassy in Moscow - <AUTHOR> https://notevenpast.org/call-pest-control-the-bug-problem-at-the-us-embassy-in-moscow/ <comment><USER2> 1964 case.</comment>


Ask HN: Why open source developers still using GitHub? - <AUTHOR> Instead of Gitlab for example? Which have much more features than Github right now. <comment><USER2> Critical mass. Everybody is on GitHub, therefore, everybody is on GitHub. It takes a significantly better product, _plus_ some serious stumbles by the incumbent, to switch that up.

For instance, before GitHub, there was Sourceforge. Github came out with some nicer UI, and rode the wave of git becoming more popular than svn. Meanwhile, Sourceforge got bought out and went scuzzy, injecting malware and toolbar garbage into installers for the ad revenue, and people got fed up and bailed.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have Github at work, for private projects, public OS projects and am part of at least one other organisation. Its comfortable to have everything on a single interface and use the same tooling for all of them. Also i still think Gitlabs interface is confusing, even thought i use it since >1 year.</comment>


Ask HN: UI Design for Financial Trading - <AUTHOR> I work as a financial futures trader, and the main software I use for order management and viewing market data is being discontinued in favour of a new version.
The old software* has been around since the early 2000s, and is a Windows application written in c++. The newer one has a C++/Linux backend, but the UI is basde on Javascript/HTML5/Chromium.
Having tried the new software, the UI performance is appalling - it feels slugggish, much like playing a video game on an underpowered PC, so seeing a generally too low framerate, which at key points drops even lower. Is this likely to be due the technologies used? I don't know much about UI coding, but would've assumed that a C++ application would perform better than one based on Javascript and Chromium.

  * https://www.tradingtechnologies.com/trading/xtrader-platform/

  ** https://www.tradingtechnologies.com/trading/tt-platform/
 <comment><USER2> For updating grids, you can achieve very fast performance using batched transactions:

[https://medium.com/ag-grid/how-to-test-for-the-best- html5-gr...](https://medium.com/ag-grid/how-to-test-for-the-best-html5-grid- for-streaming-updates-53545bb9256a)

If that's not fast enough, there are canvas based grid which can improve the refresh rates faster. Hypergrid is a canvas based grid, though it's not the easiest to work with:

[https://github.com/fin-hypergrid/core](https://github.com/fin-hypergrid/core)

JPMorgan has release Perspective, which demonstrates streaming updates using WebAssembly:

[https://perspective.finos.org/](https://perspective.finos.org/)

Really comes down to your specific situation what approach is best.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who used xtrader a lot in the past, I'm a little sad to see it get claimed by the web-based movement. That was some really fine software.

To get a sense of the tradeoffs taking place that leave you with a noticeably slower UI, see here: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2019/02/12/openfi...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2019/02/12/openfin- builds-an-os-for-traders-on-high-performance-html5/#28bfd2f837be)

PSA: It may be a good idea to hire a programmer and customize your software. TT has a nice API. If you have idiosyncratic workflows or views, or if you just want a few particular things to be faster, it's not too hard to use this API to make the tradeoffs and optimizations that work best for your own supplemental UI screens. We did this with a F# + WPF UI where the fill feed and responsiveness was just as snappy as TT's own UI (the old, c++ one).

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting - I have looked into the API, though TT tech support believe they can fix the issues I'm seeing. Any reason for choosing F#/WPF over C#/Winforms?

And agree 100% on Xtrader - very strange business decision to discontinue a 15 year old piece of software than thousands of users are willing to pay $1200 per month for!

<comment><USER3> re WPF vs winforms: consensus recommendation would be WPF. But for something you're building for yourself, WPF has a lot of complexity that you may not get much benefit from. If you decide on WPF, don't use xaml! Separating dynamic UI into a static markup language is a complexity disaster that will cost you a lot of time. (Note that google results are dominated by xaml answers, so if you want code-only answers it's best to search github.)

Best approach may be a third option, at least as a prototype. Use Excel, with a RTD server that connects to TT. Uninstall the Bloomberg Excel Tools add-in and use direct calls into BBG's own RTD server, i.e., =RTD("BLOOMBERG.RTD","","VGA INDEX", "LAST_PRICE") instead of BDP(...) for market data (~100x faster), and you can get to an 80% solution very quickly.

re F# vs C#, I had used C# for a decade before switching (after I had a vacation ruined because of a multi-threading bug in our position-sizing model. Multi-core parallelism is much easier in F# due to default immutability). If you play around with the F# REPL you'll pretty quickly find out whether the language fits your mind well or not. For me, as soon as I read this code ([http://fssnip.net/5I](http://fssnip.net/5I)), I knew I had found my native language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've personally written grids that update in real-time and handle millions of updates over the course of a day. The stack was based on React as the frontend, websockets as the delivery mechanism and Java on the backend and it scaled fine.

So, IMHO, it's mostly a bad architecture or a sub-optimal design

</comment><comment><USER5> It's possible but unlikely. The most likely reason is just bad code.

I've seen trading web ui that were as fast as native TT going back lots of years.

The most likely reason is that the ui designers do not understand the problem domain & therefore underemphasized refresh latency for something else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting - so do you think it would be possible to have a JS/HTML5 app refresh at 60FPS?

<comment><USER5> Not an expert on what is possible in that space these days but FPS is actually not that important in trading guis because you don't need the whole canvas to refresh like you do in something like a shooter.

You don't have to redraw a lot of things on each event because ladders and the like are mostly static while graphs are only dynamic in the tails.

Without observing your specific use case it is impossible to know what is causing your perception of lag, but I'd be shocked if it was bare refresh rate.

I'd guess their crappy code is just pissing off and not doing anything for big stretches of time because it isn't good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd have thought Pytho with its lauded graphing libraries (more often used in science fields) would lend itself to this sort of thing well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really sure, as it's not my field, but the graphics requirements are not about "drawing" \- more about rapidly updating multiple grids of numbers without any lag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> res</comment>


The Proper Way to Ask for Customer Feedback - <AUTHOR> https://www.kayako.com/blog/the-proper-way-to-ask-for-customer-feedback/ <comment><USER2> A puff piece but better than average.</comment>


Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-recognition.html <comment><USER3> Why? The surveillance is there.

I used this with some personal video surveillance to identify some thieves who were casing driveways to find cars to get into. Instead of wasting hours looking at footage, I was able to give the police excerpts that helped them identify the perp. Also, because of the circumstances and footage, they were able to charge him with a more serious crime than petit larceny, which means he won't be back next week.

It's an effective tool. If you're allowed to have a camera, you should be allowed to look at it with whatever means you want.

The reality is that the horse is out of the barn. The Federal government has been doing this type of surveillance either using facial or LPR data on interstate corridors since at least the 90s.

<comment><USER4> I suspect that total involuntary surveillance is not something the majority of the (United States) populace signed up for.

The legal Expectation of Privacy[0] continues to be important, even if there are people who think that it was a legal handwave that only existed due to lack of adequate technology.

\----

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

<comment><USER5> > I suspect that total involuntary surveillance is not something the majority > of the (United States) populace signed up for.

I certainly agree, but just wait until They/Them/Those start telling us this is part of some sacrosanct "social contract," and those who don't like it can simply leave.

Edit: small changes for clarity.

<comment><USER6> > If you dont like it leave

people start leaving

> wait! dont leave! We're gonna jack up the renounce-your-citizenship fee by > thousands of dollars!

actually happened already.

<comment><USER7> I didn't know about this. Do you have any links?

<comment><USER8> Try [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renunciation_of_citizenship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renunciation_of_citizenship)

TL;DR: You could renounce your US citizenship for free before 2010. Then it when up to $450. In 2014 the fee was raise to $2,350.

On top of the fee is the exit tax wherein you may be required to pay a tax on the entirety of any gains on your assets as if you had sold them all that day. And, further, if they think you are renouncing to avoid taxes they claim that you must continue to pay taxes for 10 years after you renounce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find this article a bit funny, and see it mostly as hype.

I worked very revently on a large internal face detection service for a legal and compliance application at a large US company.

Being pragmatic engineers, the first thing we did was to pilot test Rekognition against an in-house prototype built by modifying some open source deep learning approaches.

Rekognition performed so poorly compared to our prototype (which was not state of the art or anything, just good enough for our company's bespoke conpliance problem). It was just so bad. Overall intersection-over-union scores on our training & acceptance data was really poor, and perhaps worse, the latency of the requests to Rekognition was abysmal and completely unusable for us, especially for images that had a large number of identifiable faces (Rekognition service calls isually timed out at 5 seconds and returned whatever amount of faces it could process).

Our very simple prototype could fully process upwards of 30 faces with 1 second of latency, and so if using a similar 5 second timeout limit, we could process around an order of magnitude more faces (which happens more often than you think, e.g. crowds, people in public places).

I just could not believe that the web service, backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon engineers, was so slow and inaccurate.

We didn't even bother trying to price out how expensive it would be for our expected amount of throughput, because we knew from a simple accuracy and per- request latency point of view, Rekognition just couldn't cut it.

As I've moved into a more lead role with machine learning teams, this experience really opened my eyes to how seductive cloud solutions can appear to non-technical managers.

They will act like severe bean counters when they see a high salary request from a really experienced machine learning engineer, but they won't even bother with due diligence or estimating cost-per-request or cost-per-unit- accuracy for dropping money on a cloud service.

Instead of empowering a small team to do something much more cost-effective for the company, they'll ball at their internal engineers while setting a pile of money ablaze.

<comment> amzn-throw > backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon > engineers, was so slow and inaccurate.

You'd be surprised. Many many AWS services are launched by a single 2-pizza team (8-10 developers). It's in Amazon's DNA to act like a startup, ship something quickly, collect feedback, then iterate, and scale.

Rekognition will get much better in time.

<comment><USER10> Also, for the record, AWS is hardly top of the industry in terms of talent. It's not Google or Facebook. I've never heard of an ML researcher joining Amazon when they could have joined Google/FB/Apple.

<comment><USER11> It could happen both way. Noted that Google is much more saturate for its ML talents, so unless you are super top-notch, some people will take it to Amazon for bigger impact. I personally know a few people, who is competitive in the industry, having Google offer/leaving Google for Amazon.

No doubt, the flow is usually Amazon -> Google/Facebook, because for mid-level engineer/scientist, money talks :), and Google/FB generally have much open/better publication policy, while Amazon is neurotically secretive. Apple is not on the picture, I think the internal engineer culture is very problematic(no common codebase, severe NIH syndrome), except for the money, it is subpar place to grow.

Disclaimer: Work in a ML related AWS team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They are NOT selling a service that identifies people from data sets other than the police's supplied data sets. It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known criminal.

The cat is out of the bag and is already something the police could do themselves. The real fear is when they are able to source commercially available information from linked in, facebook, etc to identify everyone's whereabouts.

Pushing back this early will not have mass appeal and will not help to prevent the future, broader concerns IMHO.

<comment><USER13> > It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are > interacting with if that person is a known criminal.

Everyone is a criminal. You commit multiple crimes a day if you're like most people.

There absolutely should be a clear delineation between what is possible and what is allowed when considering state surveillance.

The 4th amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

It's right there. You have a right to be secure as a person from unreasonable searches. Massive face recognition of 'criminals' is a violation of exactly that, and should be prevented without question.

<comment><USER14> Reasonable people can disagree on the definition of "unreasonable," however.

Is it "unreasonable" for the Amber Alert system to co-opt the eyes and attention of ten thousand citizens around a kidnapped child? Hard to say. Most people seem to think 'no.'

If that system could co-opt camera feeds instead of human attention, we could get most (all?) of the benefits of the existing Amber Alert without having to burn civilian resources on it. Wouldn't that be a strict improvement over the current system?

<comment><USER15> I definitely feel like we're missing positive opportunities for mass surveillance. Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest, or who is at risk for a stroke. Someday mass surveillance will help as much as it hurts society.

<comment><USER16> What's interesting is that anyone implementing mass surveillance could care less about your proposed benefits.

<comment><USER17> I believe technology will ever erode privacy, and that the best we can hope for is to make sure the transparency goes both ways. The government should become more transparent to the people as the people become more transparent to the government. Like you though, I'm afraid we'll end up with a vast and reliable surveillance system which police will be able to use, while the police themselves are still "struggling" to get their body cams to work reliably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At some point in time we Americans are going to have to come to grips with the computational abilities of the state. There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without a search warrant [1].

What happens with false positives? What's the recourse? This very real, pernicious circumstance is rarely well thought out in advance. The no-fly list is a great example of what happens when there are not sufficient safeguards in the system.

The reality of the computational state is not going to go away. As technology progresses the informational capacity of the state increases. Are we prepared for this? At present I think not. See the reaction to the NSA warrantless surveillance of phone calls. Our leaders for the most part decried the leaking of the surveillance rather than the act of the surveillance.

[1] [https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private- cit...](https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private- citizens.html)

<comment><USER19> It's the leaking they fear most. The implementation of surveillance technologies is unavoidable. Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless. Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it.

What we DO have a shot at controlling is what is done with the data. Probably the best hope for safeguarding things like freedom and democracy lies in making surveillance data transparent and public.

<comment><USER20> _Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless._

We'll see about that. I'd say legal bans are worth a try at least.

 _Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it._

If you keep repeating that to yourself as you go to sleep each night - <USER2> gosh, eventually it will become true.

<comment><USER19> Your philosophy is admirable. Unfortunately it's also the one that led us here. Shall we wait until the surveillance state has us intractably under its boot before we stop arguing over whether its power should exist and start focusing on who we would like wielding it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Asking a company to please not sell something doesn't seem like a scalable approach. As long as there's a market someone will try to enter it. Either make it illegal for companies to sell this technology or illegal for police departments to buy it. It's a political matter.

<comment><USER22> I agree it's a legal matter, but completely illegal is not realistic. What's needed is a legal/privacy framework that addresses these new technologies. Unfortunately, I have zero faith in the law makers to understand the technology enough to really do anything meaningful. Instead, we will probably have to wait for a SCOTUS case at some point in the future to define the legal side.

<comment><USER23> Laws cannot stop a technology that is easily availabe, like number plate scanning or face recognition. Nothing can stop it.

You might just as well outlaw knives (they are in fact illegal in many European countries, which has done nothing about their easy availability, and software will be far easier to acquire than knives)

<comment><USER22> > Laws cannot stop a technology that is easily availabe, like number plate > scanning or face recognition. Nothing can stop it.

Which is why I said that completely illegal is not realistic. What laws can do is provide a scope and framework on how technology is used. Data retention, sampling, court admissibility, etc... are all pieces that can be argued and adjusted to fit with new technology. But, like I also said above, I don't have faith that current law makers understand technology enough to make any of these laws. It will take some overreach cases that end up in SCOTUS to get anything done.

> You might just as well outlaw knives

Using knives in a certain way (stabbing someone for example) is against the law. Using this new technology in certain ways could also be against law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Key quotation: "Facial recognition is not new technology, but the [criticizing] organizations appear to be focusing on Amazon because of its prominence and what they see as a departure from the company's oft-stated focus on customers."

This is an interesting side-effect of the success of AWS. Amazon's customers are not just individual consumers or even sellers anymore, but organizations on the scale of multinational corporations that rely on the cloud and national governments. Interesting to see how this will play out in future AWS offerings.

<comment><USER25> Is it me or has Amazon ever cared about customers, always marketshare and profit margin. I've never felt Amazon was a pro-consumer company, merely a side-effect that they need consumers.

<comment><USER26> On the contrary as far as Amazon-the-online-store goes: they are notoriously pro-customer to the detriment of small retailers.

<comment><USER25> The number of counterfeits and abomination of UI argues against that point. I think Amazon is against both customer and small retailer and that goes to my point they are about market share and profit margin above all else.

<comment><USER27> As someone who has sold on Amazon, its not as simple as you make it sound.

Amazon takes my product, which I identify, and puts it in a bin at whatever warehouse. Another seller, sends in the same product, but theirs is counterfeit. Without opening the package, how is Amazon to know which one of us is selling the counterfeit and which one is real?

Now, my inventory is mixed in with amazon's and this counterfeiter, that product gets shipped out with my name because the customer chose my price of the list of sellers, but Amazon takes whichever one is closer, not the one I sent them. This is done to help ensure cheapest/fastest possible shipping. I take the blame even though someone else sent bad product.

This is a shitty situation all around, but how does Amazon fight back? They do eventually go back after the counterfeiters, but its a slow and complicated process because its super simple to set up as a seller on Amazon.

But, this is also not a new issue. Ebay still has this issue and I would say its far more mature than Amazon at the "3rd party seller" crap and Ebay cant fix it either. Its a shitty hard situation to deal with.

<comment><USER28> Amazon could do what Amazon used to do, and what everyone else does: Don't comingle supplies from trusted sources from random third parties. Have you every tried selling a wholesale bag of carrots to a your local grocery store? They aren't interest, for good reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a ridiculous article. Rekognition has been available for over a year, and I've been using it for that whole year. I've even integrated it into my own home security camera.

Amazon is selling it to law enforcement, but it's not like LE get special service that no one else does. Amazon built a generic facial recognition system, and it works pretty well. Even if they weren't pushing towards the police and government, they tech is out there. Those groups could have used it on their own.

<comment><USER30> I'm not sure I follow because your home security system, correct me, is only near your home, not connected to millions of people collectively that are mechanical turked unwillingly. Them apples aren't oranges.

<comment><USER29> I'm just saying that this technology is available for everyone, even in a security context. It's not like they build this just for LE.

<comment><USER30> Right valid true. Its just that it's scary if someone has tons of money and users and AI etc etc that has this capability and misuses it on a massive scale kind of how big data only works when its big. No one cares that my localhost website has root access to my machine for example but maybe that's a silly point but I think you get what I'm saying, kind of like the tree falling in the forest... take your pick of metaphors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think this is going to happen, regardless of ACLU or whether Amazon pulls the service or not. Face recognition will be refined and sold as a package. Probably every cop car will have it one day. Courts will say that when you're in public you give certain privacy rights away etc. etc. Expect cop cars next to you if you missed a court date or violated parole.

The scariest part is the DNA fishing expeditions through cousins like [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true- crime/wp/2018/04/27...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true- crime/wp/2018/04/27/golden-state-killer-dna-website-gedmatch-was-used-to- identify-joseph-deangelo-as-suspect-police-say/?utm_term=.36cdc87a39e9) . They find a hair in a crime scene and 17 years later, more or less, you need to prove that you didn't do it. Maybe the victim was next to you at Starbucks or picked your hair with his /her shoes. Good luck

<comment><USER32> > _Courts will say that when you 're in public you give certain privacy rights > away etc. etc._

This is the law of the land right now. As to your next example, I don't see what's wrong with those, as missing a court date or violating parole is a perfectly legitimate reason for you to be arrested.

<comment><USER33> how will you feel when they start arresting serial jaywalkers?

<comment><USER34> They already wrongly ticket people at stop lights, it's a racket. They could just mail you a ticket for very small petty "crimes," like not throwing something in the right bin, jay walking, etc. Do people really think police will only use this to solve crime? Solving crimes doesn't pay the bills. Ticketing people does. Then they could also use the facial recognition to get everyone that's at a protest of the government (they already do this somewhat with cell phone signals) then they know who to put on a watch list...even if it's a legitimate protest.

I'm a bit perturbed that people on this board aren't more concerned about the many bad ways that this can be used for, especially since police oversight is notoriously bad, in virtually every country, including the west.

<comment><USER33> >I'm a bit perturbed that people on this board aren't more concerned about the many bad ways that this can be used for

they don't expect to be the ones facing oppression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > If Rekognition is not reined in, its use is also certain to spread

The tech isn't new and certainly not limited to Amazon, it's going to exist regardless of whether Amazon wants to be the one providing the APIs

<comment><USER36> I agree that it's going to happen with or without Amazon but I'd rather not support this system.

<comment><USER37> It's possible that in the short term, Amazon could be changing the economics of mass surveillance, making it more feasible for police departments that could not afford such tech before. But at this point, I think a change of dynamic is important, and that we actually _need_ an 800 pound gorilla to frighten us, before people wake up and start demanding action at the state and federal level.

It's already been half a decade since the UK surveillance regime and the reality of mass surveillance was opened to us, yet nobody batted an eyelid in the US. Meanwhile, facial recognition has improved by an order of magnitude and has already silently been seeing deployment everywhere around us. I'm being led to believe that unless we have a public poster boy to rally against, the situation isn't going to change.

<comment><USER14> Speaking of which: how have things gone with the UK's experiment?

Maybe I'm not plugged into the right channels, but I haven't heard any news about "London falsely jails thousands of people due to false-positives on the camera surveillance network" or "the Crown finds and jails protesters by the thousands."

<comment><USER37> Last I heard, it got mired in legal issues, and was recently tossed out by the courts [0]. (Something that's not quite as likely in the US due to the EU being more privacy-conscious, and would require mass outrage and an act of congress to deflect)

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass- digi...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-digital- surveillance-regime-ruled-unlawful-appeal-ruling-snoopers-charter)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Reminds me of the Palantir / New Orleans situation.

[http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/art...](http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/article_4b98f8a8-1d91-11e8-86c3-0784f6dd4d4e.html)

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir- predict...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive- policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd)

</comment><comment><USER39> Usually this sort of thing would go to IBM, Accenture etc.

AWS has tried to position themselves as being different from the old 'dinosaurs', but the public sector market is probably ripe for them to move into. They've already made steps with GovCloud, now it's time to get specialist teams and consultant contracts going.

If Amazon didn't do it I bet Google wouldn't be far behind

</comment><comment><USER30> Being an app developer and producer this seems outrageous what you can do. If anyone takes a video or image, you can track other people's faces in the scene that may or may not be your users, can gather graph info about how they are related and essentially have a wrapped up motive/alibi etc about how a potential crime could have taken place using AI and auto deliver to authorities. All this from a non-opt-in mechanical turk approach where no user is compensated or willingly testifies. What the hell do you call that? A police state?

</comment><comment><USER40> Amazon has always been a pro-law enforcement company. Remember how they shut down Wikileak's site with a single call from Joe Lieberman? (not even an official law enforcement request)

[https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks- webs...](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website- cables-servers-amazon)

</comment><comment><USER41> Police should be given full access to the latest technology. The criminals will have the latest tech. DNA, face recognition, speech recognition, big data, ML, AI, whatever comes next. However just like with guns and wiretaps, there should be laws controlling the appropriate use of these powerful tools to avoid becoming Big Brother.

<comment><USER42> Yes, the laws should move at the pace of technical capabilities. That's the big takeaway here. Not asking the cops to live in the '70s technologically, which is often the (effective) ask from privacy groups.

<comment><USER14> Privacy groups and the NRA. The system for tracking gun sales is kept on paper records by law; too much fear that digitizing the dataset would be tantamount to a "national registry of gun owners," which is in the set of irrational American fears alongside "National ID cards."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> People will be outraged until everyone starts doing it.

How long until we see tons of marketplaces to sell your home & business surveillance videos?

Maybe security companies will start offering free versions of things like Nest as long as you let them sell the video in their marketplace. It's the 21st Century way after all.

<comment><USER44> Well this is a terrifying thought.

<comment><USER14> I can't recommend David Brin's "The Transparent Society" hard enough on this topic [[https://books.google.com/books?id=wg4XBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA336&dq=0...](https://books.google.com/books?id=wg4XBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA336&dq=0738201448&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZoNun8JnbAhXtpVkKHRqrDcQQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=0738201448&f=false)].

It's a bit dated, but the basic premise---the pattern of technology getting smaller, cheaper, and easier applies to surveillance technology also---tends to continue to be an accurate depiction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world.

A new narrative about benefits other than totalitarian surveillance is going to be crafted and circulated to provide some sort of ethical fig leaf for employees but everyone involved will know the truth just not acknowledge or discuss it.

Any reasonably well informed citizen intuitively will know this is not the right direction but there is an inevitability about it, money creates its own logic and many have already made their peace with it.

<comment><USER46> > Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. > The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The > people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world.

That is already becoming SV's reputation abroad:

[https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are- ruin...](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-ruining- americas-image/)

 _While Hollywood's influence has waned, America's leading internet companies ... have spread from Silicon Valley to all corners of the globe, even some untouched by American movies and TV shows.

It's time for Americans to recognize that they have a new major cultural export, alongside movies and television: the set of modern communications platforms created in the United States that have since overtaken the world. The question then becomes: If the world looks at America and sees Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as its profile picture, what does the world think?

Americans should be concerned. We've reviewed how America's new major cultural export has been characterized in the international media and other public discourse lately, and based on that we've identified three key features that have become associated with it in the eyes of the global audience._

They go on to discuss that SV has a growing reputation as the engine of 1) the spread of "hate and harmful ideas, 2) "foreign intervention in domestic politics", and 3) "the general surrender of privacy". Well worth reading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Currently you have to pull out your phone and use their app to enter the Amazon Go stores (the no-cashiers convenience stores).

Interesting to think that Amazon could use their face recognition tech instead to let you enter without doing anything, just like you exit "without friction". You'd just need an app the first time for them to learn your face.

They haven't done this. That means they either think it'd be perceived as too creepy, or the tech isn't good enough yet.

</comment><comment><USER48> I wonder how much more outraged people would be if you swapped Amazon for Facebook which has names and much more information to tie back to a bunch of faces.

<comment><USER27> None, because as stated, even after this current facebook backlash, usage of Facebook is still high...

[https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage- actu...](https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage-actually- increased-after-privacy-scandal-data.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> When this is China everyone piles in. When it's America, it's like meh

</comment><comment><USER50> Does Amazon's Rekognition TOS allow them to keep your uploaded images as training data?

If so, there is some serious moral hazard around using this service - you are making anyone in your dataset more identifiable in the future.

</comment><comment><USER14> How long until there's a pay service where private citizens can access the toolkit also?

(Follow-up question: how long until the toolkit is just an open-source library that you can run on a Raspberry Pi? ;) ).

</comment><comment><USER51> re: ""Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments,""

Govs? Big Incs? Deep Pockets? Can any of them be trusted?

What used to be known as "local law enforcement" is now a heavily armed para- military organization that dreams technology wet dreams. Its vendors dream of drowning in cash.

The din of fear is taking its toll. The expectation of unlawfulness is becoming self-fulfilling. The kids are not alright, as the normalization of school shootings shows.

I'm not going to defend the NRA, but they are the least of my worry at this point.

</comment><comment><USER52> Is it okay to sell face recognition services to everyone _except_ law enforcement? Are other customers somehow more trustworthy? Maybe it shouldn't be sold at all?

(And how about open source?)

</comment><comment><USER53> Does anyone know how good Amazon Rekognition actually is? If the technology is not good then it might post more problems than it solves.

<comment><USER54> I write facial recognition software. If those example facial images and their match scores are any indication of their systems accuracy, it is on the poor side.

<comment><USER55> The point is that they made it available to customers as a full, scalable pipeline. They can (and will) improve their accuracy continuously. Any kiddo can take some bleeding-edge wide resnet variation and get better results than they have right now, but can't make it available at scale to anyone.

<comment><USER54> "but can't make it available at scale to anyone." =- I guess that's the popular misconception. Their system scales awful, rendering it's expense of operation on the high end side, for a weak product. They are simply exploiting their name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Can someone create a bodycam sophisticated enough to let the police know if a suspect is wielding a weapon or not?

</comment><comment><USER57> Palantir's margin is Bezos' opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER47> Also being discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126469)

</comment><comment><USER58> Why is today the day for backlash? They showcased this at re:Invent for all to see, and the obvious use was for law enforcement and surveillance. Yet another surveillance issue we're up in arms about today and won't care about tomorrow.</comment>


Q-Carbon Is Harder (and Brighter) Than Diamond - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/weird-new-type-carbon-harder-brighter-than-diamond-180957433/?no-ist <comment><USER2> The article says "emits a soft glow". Since that's impossible for something which isn't radioactive, I assume the reporter misunderstood something. What property of the material were they referring to?

<comment><USER3> > The article says "emits a soft glow". Since that's impossible for something > which isn't radioactive…

Not at all true.

In this case, it could be a phosphorescence or fluorescence process (the NYT says fluorescence), initiated by ambient light.

I skimmed both scholarly publications on this material but didn't find any mention of optical properties. I would ordinarily guess that any optical emission would involve an internal defect site (as happens with other optically-active diamond structures), but I'm thinking that's not a good guess given the synthesis process and overall quality of the monocrystalline product. A better guess might be some sort of "deep trap" emission involving surface defects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to the NYT article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/science/q-carbon-harder- th...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/science/q-carbon-harder-than- diamond.html) The substence is "magnetic, fluorescent and electroconductive" so likely it's referring to the fluorescent property and it had an electric current running through it during the demo.</comment>


Beautiful minds, wasted: how not to squander the potential of autistic people - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21696944-how-not-squander-potential-autistic-people-beautiful-minds-wasted <comment><USER2> There's a disturbing trend emerging that I really don't like, and it's not the conventional "autistic people will not make good workers" argument. In fact, it's something of an inverse: the expectation that every autistic person you hire is going to be an idiot-savant that will have unparalleled focus and attention to detail once you hire them.

Autistic people are still people. They make mistakes. They're not robots. I'm glad we've moved away from blacklisting them, but we're getting to the point of fetishizing them instead. Both directions are still dehumanizing.

<comment><USER3> > _the expectation that every autistic person_

People seem to accept stereotypes when they're positive.

<comment><USER4> Are they even that positive?

There always seems to be this underlying "yeah they are freaks, but you can take advantage of their weird behaviour".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _A debate rages about when and how to include autistic children in > mainstream classes._

Oh does this ever bring up a whole bag full of unpleasant childhood memories. I get that it's difficult for those with disabilities to function in 'normal' settings - I've got a physical handicap that is obvious from time to time (but hidden otherwise). In turn I never sought out activities for which I was an incorrect fit - you know, hockey, wrestling, soccer - they weren't going to change the sport to make it easier for me to play, nor should I expect them to. We are not all equal.

If there's a way to solve the mentioned debate, I think it will still take another 40 years for us to figure it out. We can't even take care of Gifted and Talented students with any systemic, national and local support, to fulfill their potential. If we're talking "beautiful minds" going to waste then, honestly, I think we should start with this end of the spectrum.

This article is, by and large, a plea for help and paints an extensively rosy and joyous picture of employing a person with the mentioned handicap. After half of my lifetime + change working in hourly or professional jobs, I did not particularly share the same optimism. Good help is hard to find, and that's before even considering "making little accommodations" for potentially disruptive conditions. I'm just not quite so optimistic, but would love to see society figure a lot of this stratified talent capitalization out sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER6> what kind of physical ailment?

<comment><USER5> Inherited and incurable, that's the most I disclose publicly. I grew up in a pre-HIPAA world and still keep some things as private as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I do wish people would stop romanticizing autism with phrases like "beautiful minds".

From personal experience, I can tell you that there is nothing too beautiful about growing up with a brother who never stopped throwing tantrums like a toddler, whose intelligence never developed beyond about three years old, and who without the right medication won't stop hitting his own forehead and barking like a dog.

<comment><USER8> "If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism." \-- Stephen Shore, professor of special education at Adelphi University and person with autism.

<comment><USER9> Of what use is a classification system when the elements belonging to the same class have no general, discernible commonalities?

<comment><USER10> Psychiatric classifications do tend to be problematic because personality is so complex. It's not like botany.

<comment><USER9> I agree. I wish the field of psychiatry would address these problems honestly and scientifically, rather than inventing and voting disorders into their manual.

<comment><USER11> The DSM exists for billing purposes. It's not exactly a scientific taxonomy of psychiatric disorders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> 5 years reading fist post. Has anyone ever thought of not putting so much effort on so called education. Many of tease beautiful minds are able to do things without the academics that others go though to become Qualified in. Where as when you try to force them to go though school they are unable to adapt to that completely unrelated medium of learning.

Me personaly I dropped out of High school on my 6th year because I was unable to get past 9th grade English. Never got though collage never got my GED, and not due to a lack of trying. I am now in my 3rd engineering job not in title but in the work I preform. 1st structural engineer, 2nd Mechanical engineer, and now Systems engineer. I am not going to try to clam to be a genius but I do find myself ecelling above some of the engineers who delegate there projects to me.

There are so many fields out there where these people not just the autistic can learn to do just by doing. The only reason they are stuck flipping burgers is because we have this preconception that you can not learn without a certificate form a institution of Higher education.

FYI Sorry For the bad spelling I reviewed this for 30 min, and fixed everything I could find.

<comment><USER13> > Sorry For the bad spelling I reviewed this for 30 min, and fixed everything > I could find.

But a spelling checker, such as the one built in to Firefox, would have found them all as you typed. Why is it that almost no one uses them?

<comment><USER14> Most of the spelling errors in their post were 'wrong word' errors, aka the [Cupertino effect][0]. A spell checker would not have found those. It's possible they were also relying on auto-completion, which increases this type of error.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > The range of consequences is also wide. At one end, the autism of a computer > scientist may be barely noticeable; at the other, a quarter of autistic > children do not speak.

This makes me both laugh and cry.

<comment><USER16> It makes intuitive sense that there's a bias towards mild autism/Aspergers in high-skill computer scientists.

Most would probably say that their "education" began long before any kind of formal schooling in the topic. It takes a certain kind of child to stay inside and poke at computers all day instead of going outside and doing something social. And in general, the hyper-focus of mild autism is exactly the kind of thing that drives people to become highly proficient in a technical topic.

And on the flip side, severe autism is a nightmare. Although modern society doesn't really do them any favors - historically there were lots of repetitive tasks that needed doing, a person with fairly severe autism could be perfectly fine working in a bakery or blacksmithing or something. Nowadays we really have two kinds of jobs - high skilled, for which we expect people to sit through a lot of formal education, and service jobs, which are highly social jobs usually involving "emotional labor". Neither of those is very suitable for someone with severe autism.

<comment><USER17> > It takes a certain kind of child to stay inside and poke at computers all > day instead of going outside and doing something social.

a) Why do you assume that working on computers at a young age necessarily implies social impairment? I've been working on different ideas (particularly games and businesses) with friends since I was 12.

b) Many sports also require hyper-focus to excel at a young age. If you're willing to use that as a criterion for autism, why aren't exceptional athletes who spend hours a day shooting hoops alone considered autistic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> the-dude Dutch software agency specialised in testing, employing autists only: [http://specialisterren.nl/socialenterprise/introductie.html](http://specialisterren.nl/socialenterprise/introductie.html) [dutch]

</comment><comment><USER18> >Firms that set out to recruit autistic workers, such as Walgreen's, a big pharmacy chain, find them just as productive as their peers.

I did not know that Walgreen's does that.

<comment><USER19> Sadly, they do it for their own benefit. It ticks boxes they need to tick for Federal law and tax reasons.

Do not think they do this out of the kindness of their heart.

<comment><USER20> > Sadly, they do it for their own benefit.

Around here a consulting company has specialised in this (you don't get an interview unless you have an autism spectrum diagnosis) and last I heard it wasn't at all sad:

Some autistic people with correct skills were paid _good money_ to do things they really liked well like iron out rare bugs in financial services etc.

So not only to fill some quota and not taken advantage of. Oh, and said company made good money IIRC.

<comment><USER19> The context was Walgreens. Some companies _are_ smart enough to hire high functioning autists to hammer down hard to nail bugs. Most aren't.

<comment><USER20> The only part I tried to nuance was that "for their own benefit" doesn't always mean pure evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nils-m-holm The German company "auticon" is employing autistic consultants exclusively (medical diagnosis required). Recently, I happened to talk to one of their in- house coaches, and from what I've heard, they seem to make quite an effort to create a work environment in which people with autism can thrive.

[http://auticon.de](http://auticon.de) \- not affiliated.

</comment><comment><USER13> How about just not squandering the potential of people?

<comment><USER21> Could you expand on your ideas for improvement?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I work with a manual QA team who explicitly recruit testers on the autism spectrum. It's a great mission and they've done great work: [http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-hires-people-on- autis...](http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-hires-people-on-autism- spectrum-2014-7)

</comment><comment><USER17> > The current estimate is one in 68—or one in 42 among boys.

Does anyone know where these numbers come from? It's much higher than I would have expected.

</comment><comment><USER23> those are more people that could be working for corporations! we must right this wrong!

</comment><comment><USER24> >one in 42 boys...38 in S.Korea

Are we calling every socially awkward kid autistic or did we, as humanity, finally "done did" the genepool?

<comment><USER25> Leaving aside the tastelessness of phrasing the question this way, you may be underestimating the prevalence of mental health disorders in general. This is the NIMH's page on the prevalence of schizophrenia in the general population, for instance: [http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/schizop...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/schizophrenia.shtml)

It sounds like the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders is a bit over double that, but as the article notes, that includes "functional" autists whose symptoms may be hardly noticeable to those around them.

<comment><USER24> Let me rephrase it, are we diagnosing these disorders wrongly or are we heading towards a human population which has more people with disorders then not? Because 1 in 38 or 42 are scary numbers.

<comment><USER26> I don't think that's a meaningful question. One could go back a couple of centuries, before germ and virus theory was developed, and ask the same thing about physical illnesses.

It would be more accurate IMO to say that we're getting a better understanding of traits and characteristics of the human mind, some of which we currently have reason to believe are disorders, and are getting better at detecting those traits/characteristics.</comment></comment></comment></comment>