Lawsuit: Oracle called $50K 'good money for an Indian' - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/it-management/399838/ex-oracle-salesman-claims-complaining-about-wage-discrimination-got-him-fired <comment><USER3> I think this story is missing some key pieces (it seems like it was created by the plaintiff's lawyer). Still if the commentary suggested is true, then Oracle could be in trouble. The technicality that I wonder about is that this guys wasn't "harmed" by being told to pay the foreign worker less, (mental distress complaint aside) and the foreign worker presumably doesn't know this happened and so isn't suing Oracle.

And all of that is conflated by the fact that the person is already hired so it isn't a hiring question, it is a pay question. And at least in the several "managing legally" I've been to, paying people differently doesn't get you into legal trouble like not hiring or firing them does.

That said, at one of the companies where I worked there was a suggestion for engineers to go to India to help train local engineers, and having their salary be the same as their peers would have in India. (as opposed to California salaries) It was controversial to say the least.

<comment><USER4> I think his argument is that he was fired for trying to prevent Indian employees being discriminated against, which might be considered unfair dismissal. In the UK being fired for exposing wrongdoing within the company counts as unfair dismissal, I don't know if the US has a similar system in place to protect workers in situations like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes, the so-called "shortage" of STEM workers is just an excuse to relax immigration laws in order to pay foreigners less than domestic workers.

<comment><USER6> Well there is certainly scarcity, and I don't think an isolationist approach will help. We need to protect the H1Bs and equivalents coming to our countries; give them better rights, increase their leverage. This will make it harder for employees to drive down their, and by extension our, salaries. This is because foreign and domestic workers are substitute goods from an HR perspective.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you on the immigrant protections, but not everyone agrees on the scarcity point: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem- crisis-i...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a- myth)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Correct me if I'm wrong, but $50k actually is good money for an Indian right?

Pretty sure this is just a way for everyone on HN to vent their outsourcing frustrations under the thin guise of political correctness.

<comment><USER8> I am not for political correctness but let me try to counter your perspective

Since the Indian employee has a good track record and the company is willing to transfer him to US, lets assume that he has around 8-10 years of experience.

This would qualify the person for about INR 2 to 2.5 M annual pay excluding commissions. This is about USD 35 - <USER2>

For such a pay, the quality of living of the Indian person would be

(might vary slightly based on the city in India)

1\. Owns at least one 3BHK house / apartment right in the middle of the city (~ 10-15 minute commute to office) with groceries/malls within walking distance or max 10 mins drive

2\. Drives own car (atleast Honda City, Ford Fiesta, Hyundai Verna), with a good chance of a second car

3\. Owns some of the following: iPhone, iPad, Samsung G S4/Note, smart tv, home theatre system, a modern kitchen, full internet connectivity, power backup

4\. Good chance of at least one child and that child studying in a leading private school

5\. Has a paid help for daily chores (washing, cleaning etc.)

6\. All labour for any domestic purpose electric, plumbing, car mechanic etc. are all down right affordable without even a pinch

50K definitely is higher than the 35-40K USD he is receiving and it is upto the person to accept it. However, the person would definitely be compromising as I doubt if the 50K USD will assure the above list when the person chooses to live in the US

<comment><USER9> USA marketing must be top-notch, if smart people are willing to give up all that to come here.

<comment><USER8> Yes indeed, if one thing US is best at it would be marketing, but what I have explained is only true for the past decade (2000 upwards). Upto the 90s and before the tech boom, it was very difficult to make a good living in India where the only stable choice then was to take up a government job.

The generation before (those born till 70s in India) had to struggle a lot under newly independent India and its socialistic ideals. That generation also created the craze about going away from India to build their careers. Couple this with the civic issues of India (which are still prevalent) and you end up in the popular view about India in the west.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article was basically written by the plantiff's lawyer. Of course it's heavily slanted to one side. Would want to hear the other side.

Even what is written doesn't sound lawsuit worthy. In the end, the company was offering an existing employee a raise to $50K per year and this one unrelated guy thought $60K was a better offer. It's a fine line. I can't see the guy winning his suit based on only $10K difference to an employee that doesn't even know this conversation is happening.

Companies are always trying to pay less than they have to, regardless of race. I've seen countless times employers being happy that a candidate, when asked how much salary they wanted, came back with a low number. Everyone in the hiring process knows the candidate is under-pricing themselves to the market, but lo and behold the offer comes at what they asked for. "More money to get the next candidate"

<comment><USER11> I don't think the numbers themselves are the problem. The problem is (if proven) that the hiring manager said those fateful words "...enough for an Indian".

<comment><USER12> Unless the hiring manager wrote this somewhere like an email, I doubt it will be proven at all. Anyway for now it is nothing more than just hearsay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll just comment on an experience that someone had while interviewing at oracle.

A friend, recently graduated from my school, was flown to their headquarters for a final round of interviews. She asked "What does your company look for in a candidate?"

She got the one word response, "Testosterone."

She did not get the job.

Coincidentally my friend is Indian.

<comment><USER14> If that really happened, your friend likely has grounds for legal action.

I have a hard time believing that even at Oracle someone would be stupid enough to say that to a candidate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not a lawyer and I would love the hear opinion about this. Do companies use L-1 visas to workaround H1B requirements?

As far as I understand L-1 visa (which is probably used here) has no prevailing wage requirement. They can even still be on payroll of Oracle in India (or whatever Oracle's entity in India is called).

<comment><USER16> >I'm not a lawyer and I would love the hear opinion about this. Do companies use L-1 visas to workaround H1B requirements

Yes, often they come over under the veil of a 'temporary assignment' so they remain on foreign payroll. They can stay up to three years before having to renew/reapply. I worked for an immigration law firm and I saw wages as low as $15,000/year coming from South Korea to work at Fortune 500s.

<comment><USER17> This is a strategy used by Accenture's ATS division. Teams of 100+ engineers deployed in the US, being bused to hotels and given meal vouchers at night, while earning Indian wages.

<comment><USER18> THere's a huge secondary benefit (to the employee) for L-1s, though. Spouses pretty much automatically qualify for an L-2, which allows them to work at- will in the US, too. So, even if the L-1 worker is severely underpaid (based on prevailing wages in their home country), their spouse can apply for a job paid using the US salary standards. L-1 also allows for immediate Green Card application, and is a much smoother path toward permanent residency than H-1B.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Discrimination based on race and discrimination based on the foreign nationality immigrant status are very different things, no?

<comment><USER20> Xenophobia is racism's twin sister.

<comment><USER21> I don't believe anything in the article indicates this was Xenophobia. It sounds entirely plausible that it wasn't "offer him less because he's brown", but rather "offer him less because he lives in a lower-cost-of-living and lower-average-income country". i.e. this might be akin to saying "that's good money for someone from Alabama". It's not about race, it's about location.

I'm not saying there's a ton of evidence in favor of what I'm saying, I'm just saying it's a possible explanation.

<comment><USER20> I understand your point: different countries have different costs of living and different average income values.

Even though it's entirely hypocritical of me (I'm somewhat okay with Chinese companies paying lower wages as long as they're above the average Chinese income), I still can't let go of how "it's okay, he lives in India so he doesn't need that much money" sounds like "it's okay, she's black, she doesn't need that much money and wouldn't know what to do with it anyway" or "it's okay, he's Asian, I bet he's frugal enough not to need the same wage as our white employees".

<comment> jack-r-abbit Your examples are ridiculous. Your two "sounds like" examples are straight up racist (not that you think these things so please don't think that I'm calling _you_ a racist). The other is just a geographical one that happens to span national borders. Even in the US, among the same race, people get paid less if they live in places that cost less. It has nothing to do with black or Asian. My company is based in California but has an office in North Dakota. The devs in ND make about 60% of what the devs in CA make. Nothing wrong about that.

But this guy was being relocated to the US. What wage is appropriate in India has no relevance to what is appropriate where he was being relocated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Oracle will get kicked in the buffalo packet on the point of "retaliation." Essentially, they fired him because he was questioning them - you can't do that, especially in California which has hugely employee slanted laws. The point of whether the Indian sales hire was being discriminated against is not in the senior salesperson's domain - it would be the Indian's lawsuit to file.

<comment><USER23> ...buffalo packet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My first impression was this person attempted to inject race into everything at Oracle and higher-ups simply just had enough of it and fired him.

50K is unthinkable of an offer while but 60K is not... Whatever.

It's clear the offer made was 50K because the employee was willing to take it to get the benefit of working US-side. Not because he was being discriminated against.

The only issue was someone said something stupid.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's 2014, it's a globalized world. There are thousands of Americans living in India and vice-versa (probably more Indians in the US). The "good money for an Indian" if true, is clearly a despicable statement to make about a fellow employee with regards to his/her pay. I understand the posts about salary negotiation, but he/she wasn't directly engaged in it nor should someone's background/living standards shouldn't be taken into consideration when being posted in another country. Where are all the company moral values? Or quite simply where is human decency? Shameful, if true.

</comment><comment><USER26> Not sure what is going on here. A person on a H-1B visa, should be paid atleast 60k in the US. In California, it is somewhat higher.

Either this guy is coming on B-1 visa, or something is wrong here.

</comment><comment><USER27> You get what you pay for. The only people joining would be the one's who have no other option. They'll only harm themselves in the long run I think.

</comment><comment><USER28> Globalization is Zero-Sum. Amend your Constitution accordingly. Otherwise your future generations will regret.

</comment><comment><USER29> 50K in california will be like 2K in saving after being ultra-frugal.

</comment><comment><USER30> If this outrages you, wait 'til you hear about all the jobs corporations ship overseas just to pay a fraction of and write it off.

You mean there are a-holes in the business world?

<comment><USER31> What's your point? We shouldn't fight against bad things because worse things also exist?

<comment><USER30> No I mean you are protesting the wrong things.

<comment><USER5> Because you can only protest one thing at a time, it's a universal law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Please don't act like Oracle is the only SV company doing this. The free markets decided that pervasive racism in compensation is OK in SV.

<comment><USER33> agree, there are several companies in SV who are paying full time employees even less than 50K working in technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Labor costs, labor costs, labor costs. (And racism, of course.)

<comment><USER35> It seems to be nationalism, not racism. The quote refers to the country, not American Indians.

<comment><USER36> Nationality is a protected class in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> would he be coming on a H1b visa?</comment>


Releasing the Unity C# source code - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/03/26/releasing-the-unity-c-source-code/ <comment><USER2> Important notes from article:

This Friday we published the Unity engine and editor C# source code on GitHub, under a reference-only license.

We are not releasing Unity as open source. Not even a little bit. (Sorry.)

We also do not take pull requests against the C# reference source code.

That's it! The reference source code repository is at [https://github.com/Unity- Technologies/UnityCsReference](https://github.com/Unity- Technologies/UnityCsReference), enjoy using it as reference for your Unity learning needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> This eerily reminds me of how Valve Corporation handled the now abandoned Source engine, and it's 2004, 2007, and 2013 mainline public SDK branches. After this experience, I will absolutely not consider using closed engines. The feeling of putting years of work into a project on a closed engine only to run into issues further down the line that cannot be resolved by proprietary roadblocks caused by the engine's company changing direction instills a burn that you cannot heal from and takes away a sense of innocence on a hobbyist platform.

<comment><USER4> Any suggestions for open engines with some similarity to the tools provided in Unity3d, Lumberyard/Crytek, or Unreal4?

<comment><USER5> Check out Godot! It Looks very promising. I mess around with MonoGame but will look at switching over once they fix some of the bugs with the newly added c# support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The economics of the game engine business are terrible. The economics of the game business in general are terrible already and when you're in the engine business you've got a big cost overhead with a revenue stream made up mostly of 0, a few small trickles, and then some big wins which turn out to be capped licence buy-outs, because your _customers_ are in a business with poor economics. It's worse than selling to Apple. AFAICT (I have no special inside knowledge) Unity isn't making any real money (I believe even a company the size of Microsoft pays only $2M/year, though they may also pay per-title fees).

As far as I can see the only way it works is the way Unreal does it: they develop their engine for their own needs and coincidentally let others do it (cf Lumberyard). It's conceivable that a "casual consortium" a la GCC, Linux et al could build one but I don't see any signs of it.

      a very steep power law, high marketing (and even licencing) costs, heavy competition...  It's a $100B market but most of the profit is around the core product, not in it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm really glad they did this (even better if we could compile and fix our own bugs). I'd love to see the sources of the binaries linked — there's a lot missing from the C# code (ie. I'd love to see how cloth is implemented and why is it crashing on me so frequently).</comment>


A man who saved a generation of premature babies (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36321692 <comment><USER2> > Today it would be considered unethical to exhibit premature babies and > charge fairgoers to see them [...] have to think back to that time [...] > Nowadays when new technology comes out we do randomised controlled trials. > [...] the shows were a way of demonstrating the benefit of using incubators

I'll leave aside ongoing issues of wealth affecting access to trials, of pipeline latency, of high variance in quality of care, and of anticipated financials determining which innovations are pursued or not so much.

The shows were also about paying for treatment. How many people in the US today, would be eager for quality care from an "unethical" side-show clinic, rather than delaying their own care, or being bankrupted by it? What elements of your care would you opt-in to being livestreamed, if it meant you didn't have to pay for them? Free quality dental care at the mall... shown live on the big screen, with the dentist's running critique of your brushing.

There seems a recurring pattern of tuning regulatory and structural costs for some market segment, tolerating a low-profile gray or black market to serve those completely excluded, and not acknowledging the life impact on those inbetween.

<comment><USER3> > How many people in the US today, would be eager for quality care from an > "unethical" side-show clinic, rather than delaying their own care, or being > bankrupted by it?

It's deeply revolting someone would need to face such a choice.

<comment><USER4> How revolting is the status quo, i.e. nobody has to face such a choice because one of the options is illegal?

<comment><USER3> You know that in most developed countries (and most developing ones too) you wouldn't have to face this choice because you wouldn't need to pay for medical treatment, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An episode from the always interesting 99% Invisible about this: [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the- infantorium/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-infantorium/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Access to care continues to be an issue. When my kids were in NICU some parents were driving 3 hours each way every day to see their child because their newborn had to be in UCSF to survive.

<comment><USER7> And the poor children need to be held, and feel the warm embrace of another human being (hopefully their parents), but because of concerns around machinery and sanitation it's still very difficult to make that happen.</comment></comment>


"The Ethnic List" - <AUTHOR> So, here's an interesting tid-bit. I just got an email from Google. I began the interview process with them last year, but stopped in order to pursue other opportunities. Well, they sent me a survey today, to see how they can do better with the interview process.
Welp...they didn't BCC everyone on the list. They CC'd everyone. Which means that we see all 500 people that this was going to. Much to my surprise, all of the rejects were "ethnic".
That is all.
(This is more of a 'lol' that an angry rant) <comment><USER2> Either that, or each ethnic block was given a customised email in a funny attempt at "localisation" \-- not that I really believe such to be the case.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> At least they're trying...amirite?</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any viable alternatives to reCAPTCHA? - <AUTHOR> I want to protect forms from bot submissions but I don't want to feed the Google beast with my visitors' data<p>Are there any alternatives to reCAPTCHA that work to stop spam submissions? <comment><USER2> There are plenty of SaaS services. But I think you first need to find the right use case. For example, if it's a user login, you're probably better off with a basic honey pot plus MFA. If it's a blog, then you'll get rid of majority of spam with a simple captcha such as a math problem or one of the many open source basic image captcha implementations.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I should have been more clear in my OP. Unfortunately I doubt I'll get a decent response having seen just how fast this post fell off /new

By recaptcha I meant the current version of it, invisible to the user</comment></comment>


Objective-C: Rubyist's Insight - <AUTHOR> http://goshakkk.name/blog/2011/08/19/objective-c-rubyists-insight/

<comment><USER2> I like the comparison of the two languages.

As an aside, I don' think the author is a native English speaker. If you read this and have problems with the grammar (noticeable lack of "a"s), read the blog as if Pavel Chekov was reading it you. Much better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I'm not native English speaker. Okay I'll try to fix grammar issues.</comment></comment>


Tyler Cowen launches fellowship and grant program for moon shot ideas - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/economist-tyler-cowen-launches-a-fellowship-and-grant-program-for-moon-shot-ideas/ <comment><USER3> It's hard to se what Satoshi and Peterson have in common, aside from that they are two people Cowan would have never funded before they were famous.

<comment><USER4> Jordan Peterson is so controversial, why would you mention him in that interview? "Team" Satoshi actually solved fundamental problems and moved the world forward in cryptocurrency and associated underlying technology like blockchains, but Peterson has just stirred people up.

<comment><USER5> I am also curious about the allusion to Peterson. I am not aware of any huge societal contribution he has made beyond encouraging dueling op-eds. Certainly he has a devoted fan base, but I essentially never hear about him in real life.

I'm not weighing in on how good or bad his ideas are. But I see way more of the blockchain in the world than I do (knowingly) of Peterson.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER6> I have thoroughly consumed a lot of Peterson content. I can vouch that aside from the political controversy, that he has a powerful message for young men: to find the meaning in life through responsibility and sacrifice, to go out there and make something of themselves. I have no idea why that it is "controversial" to be told to strive for something, and I don't see much alternatives other than self-help books. There are much more troubled, aimless people out there than you think, because if you've lived a fairly decent life yourself, you almost never come into contact with the guys that aren't doing so well and are in need of such a message. He's almost filling in as a father figure for young men where self-help did not suffice. The opposing side likes to attempt to character assassinate him by labelling as a right-wing bigot, but have never bothered to really listen to his message while holding the empathy that more unfortunate people DO need a message like that.

<comment><USER7> To me, his controversial argument is the idea that the academy is infested with communists who think you should be thrown in jail for using the wrong pronouns, and that an entire generation of college students is taking women's studies classes wherein they are taught that the problem with the world is that men exist and that they aren't enough like women. And that in these leftist circles you're not allowed to talk about sexism perpetrated by muslim men. And a bunch of other such theories.

Sure, all of that exists in various crappy people in obscure corners of academia. But he makes it out to be widespread, and he makes it out that no dissenting voices are allowed to exist on the left or in academia. Neither of which is true. But more troubling, there's a community of right wing pundits who use Peterson and his theories to justify total vilification of the left and academia in their entirety. The impression you get from Peterson is that no gender studies professor has ever done anything except hate traditional values and the people who love them.

There are people out there making constructive criticisms of overzealous leftists. Peterson seems to be choosing a purely divisive path. You can tell because he never talks to or about anyone on the left with more moderate views. He only engages the center right and the radical left, because fundamentally his goal isn't to reform the left, it's to justify his own rightward shift in his personal politics.

<comment><USER8> After the events of the past few years, I don't think it's tenable to cast the problems Peterson highlights as occasional and obscure. Look at FIRE's speech code analysis: most universities have administrative restrictions on free inquiry. Look at Heterodox Academy's work on ideological bias: social science is 90% left, with something like 30% (from memory) calling themselves "radical". Look at the current replication crisis, which arises in part from fabrication of ideologically convenient results.

I simply cannot agree with your assertion that Peterson et al are cherry- picking and that academia is fundamentally sound. These pathologies are too common and too widespread not to constitute some kind of systemic issue. I find your arguments unconvincing. Instead, I believe that a correction is long overdue.

Disciplines that reject reason, empiricism, and rigor, that claim all truths are equally valid, and that hold the only valid goal of pedagogy is tearing down power dynamics --- these are indoctrination, not inquiry, and the public should not fund this activity.

> no dissenting voices are allowed to exist on the left or in academia

Academia really does apply extreme social and political pressure to unorthodox thinkers. Look at the campaign against Rachel Fulton Brown.

> use Peterson and his theories to justify

It's become common lately to argue that we shouldn't acknowledge certain facts because unscrupulous people might use them to justify something bad. This position is not tenable. The truth always gets out, and when it does, those suppressing it lose all of their influence and credibility. It's far better to acknowledge facts and work with them.

<comment><USER7> None of what you've said looks like evidence to me. I see arguments and anecotes.

The fact that unscrupulous people lean on Peterson to villify the left is not my concern. My concern is that Peterson seems to engage exclusively with those people, and he himself doesn't appear to see any variance amongst people in the various groups he targets (leftists, academics, feminists, antifa, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Aren't there a few such projects to fund moon shots?

What/where is the best list of moon shots being currently worked on and backed?

<comment><USER10> SBIR Grants are supposed to finance "moon shot" projects. Unfortunately the way they are granted is very "opaque" to put it mildly and without going into more detail.

<comment><USER11> What do you mean? SBIR grants are intended to support early stage innovation projects. They should be able to be commercialized, but too high risk for normal investors. That's not really the same thing as a moon shot program. And individual federal agencies that participate in the program can decide what they are interested in researching.

<comment><USER12> > That's not really the same thing as a moon shot program.

Matthew Weinberg, former Special Advisor to the SBA's Office of Investment and Innovation, disagrees with you. With respect to the SBIR program, he said:

"It's fundamentally astounding that the federal government—not private venture capital firms or banks—is the entity backing these _moonshot_ investments that end up changing the world[1]."

He also wrote an article about the SBIC and SBIR programs entitled, "Your federal government drives innovation by investing in _moonshots_ [2]".

(My italics)

1\. [https://www.fundera.com/blog/sbir- program](https://www.fundera.com/blog/sbir-program)

2\. [https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/03/your-federal-government- dr...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/03/your-federal-government-drives- innovation-by-investing-in-moonshots/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In 25 years we can look back who has had a greater impact on society - <USER2> people awarded a McArthur grant or the people awarded an Emergent Ventures grant. My money would be on Phil Baran and Carolyn Bertozzi, not Jordan Peterson and Nakamoto Satoshi. _Nota bene_ : John McArthur was a financier himself.

<comment> barry-cotter Both of the chemists you mention were already wildly professionally successful before they got their MacArthur Grant. The MacArthur Grant was not encouraging success, it was rewarding it.

If they're typical recipients of MacArthur Grants then the Emergent Ventures grantees will definitely look worse on average. Some of them will try and fail. None of the MacArthur grant awards are going to fail and drop into obscurity. They've all already reached some level of success.

Whatever about Peterson Satoshi Nakamoto developed a financial technology on a par with at least international wire transfers and possibly fiat money. Even if BitCoin as such is insecure and collapses, worthless some altcoun is going to be traded in 100 years. The technology is a big deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This part of the application is making me nervous because I feel like I'm missing something:

> what is one mainstream or "consensus" view that you absolutely agree with? > (This is our version of a "trick" question, reversing the now-fashionable > contrarianism.)

I searched Google for variations on the _contrarian_ inverse of the question, but couldn't find anything that seemed relevant.

Can you help me?

<comment><USER15> [https://fs.blog/2015/11/the-single-best-interview- question-y...](https://fs.blog/2015/11/the-single-best-interview-question-you- can-ask/)

<comment><USER14> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's interesting to see the America's most prominent libertarian economist state that capital markets aren't adequately funding risky business ventures...

<comment><USER17> Many libertarians believe in market failures, and (I think) most believe it's possible for markets to NOT fully capitalize on business opportunities.

Of course, Cowen is also a market actor. So, I'm not sure where the inconsistency lies.

<comment><USER18> David Friedman (anarcho-capitalist)'s comment on market failures is that they do happen, but what might be called government failures also happen, and are probably a worse problem.

"Individual actors usually receive most of the benefit and pay most of the cost of their actions, making market failure the exception, not the rule. On the political market individual actors—voters, politicians, lobbyists, judges, policemen—almost never bear much of the cost of their actions or receive much of the benefit. Hence market failure, the exception on the private market, is the rule on the political market."

[http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/Market%20...](http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/Market%20Failure.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting that the two examples are Satoshi and Jordan Peterson. When I see "moon shot" I typically think of space elevators and such. Perhaps this is a truly unique type of fund but at first glance, I have a hard time seeing the similarity of these two folks other than having initially fringe ideas.

<comment><USER20> Jordan Peterson seems pretty useless overall. His climate change views seem to suggests he thinks he is a lot smarter than he is.

<comment><USER4> Peterson in interviews even says he is smarter than every interviewer (I've listened to a few of them). He just comes across as pretty conceited. Everyone has their areas of expertise, but the claim that you don't know anything but 'they' do comes across like a certain world leader.

<comment><USER12> > Peterson in interviews even says he is smarter than every interviewer (I've > listened to a few of them)

I've never heard him say this. Can you direct me to one such interview? I'm not a huge Peterson fanboy, but neither do I think the man is the demon-being that he's sometimes portrayed as by many in the media.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Applied!

Slater Systems LLC

Wish us luck (Slater and me)

</comment><comment><USER21> I suspect GMU/Mercatus has a few early crypto adopters given the symmetry of their ideas with crypto political ideals. What does a GMU academic economist do with hodl money? Form a grant program with a heavily libertarian bent.

</comment><comment><USER22> "People such as Satoshi and Jordan Peterson have had huge impacts (regardless of one's degree of enthusiasm for their ideas), and yet in terms of philanthropic funding the world just isn't geared to seed their ambitions," said Cowen.

I don't understand this quote. Satoshi is a fictional person as far as I'm concerned, who's idea has already succeeded to the extent that it can.

I don't even want to know what this Jordan Peterson guy needs funding for. He already has a very vocal, supportive fan base. He can probably raise a lot of money with Kickstarter if he needed to.

<comment><USER23> Would you please stop creating accounts for every couple comments you post? That's explicitly against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it.

HN can't be a community without members. Disembodied comments are not community members. No one is required to use their real name here, but users need to have some consistent identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no community at all.

A disembodied-comment forum would be a different kind of site—perhaps an interesting one, but not Hacker News. You're free to find one or create one, but not to turn this one into that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER24> While I agree with this in practice, with the culture wars of the past few years, HN has recently received its fair share of people who downvote due to disagreement. It used to be that downvotes were generally reserved for poor quality comments and upvotes were given for substantive well-considered comments even when one disagreed. Eternal september and culture wars are a bad combination. It's no longer innocent ignorance in this eternal september.

I don't have a solution to offer here, but I increasingly sympathize with those that create throwaway accounts, especially now that intent is not longer considered when interpreting comments. People have been losing their jobs not for what they meant, but due to how their words were interpreted by someone else. The fact that HN doesn't allow one to delete their comments, makes these cultural changes increasingly concerning. Who knows which of our past comments will come back to bite us as society becomes less tolerant of ideas.

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

[http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html)

<comment><USER23> That's inaccurate. Downvoting for disagreement has always been ok: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314).

It's also inaccurate about deletion. We're happy to delete or redact older comments when users ask us to, and we do this all the time. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. What we don't allow is wholesale deletion.

I was talking mostly about users who create throwaway accounts for everything, including uncontroversial stuff, so I don't see the relevance of the culture wars here.

As for Eternal September, people have been saying these things for almost as long as HN has existed. If you want a plus-ça-change moment, take a look at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871) from eight years ago (edit: or [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604), from nine).

<comment><USER25> I have always wondered if its possible to have three buttons (A)gree, (D)isgaree and (U)nhealthy. The first two buttons control how high up a comment apears in the thread/page and the last does the graying out currently reserved for downvoting. If there was any forum where people could deal with three buttons, HN would be it. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER23> That's maybe not so different from upvote, downvote, and flag?

HN's system is long established. I don't see much upside to reordering it, and considerable downside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Unless you are able and willing to risk the entire US silver reserve (see the Manhattan project), you aren't actually funding moonshots.</comment>


Why did Facebook acquire Mapillary? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@joemorrison/why-on-earth-did-facebook-just-acquire-mapillary-9838405272f8 <comment><USER4> Great read on the possible rationale - <USER2>

#1 It Hurts Google - erodes googles dominance vis a vis commercial access to geospatial data + a viable reason to collect valuable location data on end users.

#2 It Complements Their Augmented Reality Business

#3 It Supports Facebook's Place Data Generally _" what if street level imagery and supplementary data like reviews were built directly into Facebook's products or at least resided somewhere on a Facebook property that could be linked out to? That at least would keep users in their scrupulously measured web of control."_

I would flesh out one related/adjacent point.

~Google's mission statement: "Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

~Facebooks Mission Statement: "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together"

I'm not so naive as to suggest these ideals aren't deeply infiltrated/influenced by commercial imperatives but it is possible to see the way some of their behavior wraps around the stated principles. Google's credo of organizing information aligns with building out immense location data - <USER3> effectively mapping the world (and subsequently commercializing it). Whereas with facebook what I have noticed is - given their size and scale; they can follow their users (and subsequently envelope/"empower" user efforts to create community) ...if need via acquisition. In the digital world this has mean't buying the likes of instagram and whatsapp to ensure that community-building happens under the nexus of Facebook's control. If you accept that facebook believes in being where it's users are; understanding/being more proximate to users and how they traverse the real-world is invaluable - you are now more able to map out a digital proxy that is informed by person's experience of the real world. By creating a more informed digital proxy you embed a user more deeply in your ecosystem.

<comment><USER5> Facebook has completely failed. New York and Sydney have been thousands of miles apart since Facebook first set out to "bring the world closer together" and they haven't budged an inch since then.

<comment><USER5> But even if we dont take them literally: the united states is on the brink of civil war. We're more divided than ever, at the same time that individuals are spending record screen time engaged with facebook. Complete and utter failure to bring people together. The shareholders ought to have zuckerberg pilloried.

<comment><USER6> There's something about divide and conquer in there, i'm sure of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its still puzzling to me why facebook wanted it. I have used mappilary a bit and it is not an alternative to google street view. The images tend to be shit quality at odd angles and with window reflections in the way and are not 360 degrees like googles are. The only purpose of mappilary in my view is for open street map mapping since the images are usually good enough to read points of interest on the side of roads so you can add them to OSM which street view does not allow.

<comment><USER8> I agree the quality of the images are very poor. Why go through all that effort of data collection with such inferior hardware? Most of the images are completely unusable.

<comment><USER9> "Unusable" for human eyes, or unusable for computers? The images do not need to be very pretty for a computer to extract street signs and other features.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My guess would have been AR being the biggest driving force. Oh, and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be "placed in context" on the map. Especially given Facebook's "sell the users" business model, an accurate map of where the users are with respect to where the advertisers are would be quite useful to them (and it wouldn't do to depend on Google, since they'll butt heads as advertising platforms).

Making the platform free to commercial users as well might be more in line with Facebook's business models — I'm guessing they'd rather create an API which allows them to exfiltrate end-user data, than charge companies for using their API.

<comment><USER11> > and every outdoor photo on Facebook can now more easily be "placed in > context"

When you factor in their ML prowess [i] it's not hard to imagine that _every photo you submit_ w̶i̶l̶l̶ is getting automagically tagged with an astonishing amount of context: who, what, when, and where ( _why_ too since they have all of your chats/messages too).

[i] [https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2](https://github.com/facebookresearch/detectron2)

<comment><USER12> Google are more likley to do this first. They already have a global scale visual positioning service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wild prediction here, but I think this has largely to do with their VR/AR business. Sure, having a platform to manage more spatial data is cool, but I don't think this adds _that_ much value to their current data.

In comparison, it could be bleeding edge for AR. There are few companies with a notable footprint in the street imagery business. Google is obviously number one, HERE has their own fleet and I think maybe TomTom and a few others actively capture this data.

What none of those companies have, however, is a flourishing VR/AR play. Zuckerberg is clearly bullish on VR/AR and Oculus is largely leading the consumer market.

This is where my prediction gets wild, Facebook intends to replicate real world environments in virtual reality. This is what OpenSfM could potentially do with enough hands on it.

I spent a considerable amount of time trying to do this myself. Photogrammetry is still in its infancy, but it works. I replicated my office in virtual reality using a phone app and Unity. I wanted to do the same with a single street, and that's how I first came across Mapillary. The technical challenge was too much for me, but I know it's possible based on literature.

Imagine doing this at scale with a network of vehicles and much improved software. You could, hypothetically, replicate the roads of New York City in a 3D environment. Imagine playing a video game in a real world environment, or simply being able to walk the streets of a place you've never been before. These could be transcendent experiences.

<comment><USER14> Your prediction isn't a prediction. It's fact. Just watch the videos posted from the previous Oculus Connect [1]. They demo some early prototypes to show their vision.

Several times I needed to pick my jaw off the floor from what they've accomplished with mapping the real world and virtualizing it. The fidelity is breathtaking.

If they keep up the pace of miniaturization we'll have Rainbow's End before we know it.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL2xVXGs1SP78z-KC3S1Z...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL2xVXGs1SP78z-KC3S1ZYV_67gT7Sk9i)

<comment><USER15> Hey this is Joe from the blog post. Holy shit. I didn't know about any of this.

<comment><USER14> Holy shit indeed. Any new thoughts as a result of this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Recent threads on the acquisition announcement:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23564854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23564854)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23583034)

</comment><comment><USER12> Its entirely down to AR.

Facebook need a sub CM accurate, self-updating, visual positioning map. Its the only practical way that "multiplayer" AR can work. (in fact any kind of useful AR)

SLAM only gets you so far (as we've seen with google and apple) as its only capable of tracking relative movements (if you have two phones, both their coordinate systems will be relative to their starting point, making accurate placing of assets impractical )

So what does mapillary do that helps?

1) the real time segmentation on a mobile phone is fucking spectacular, compare the speed and robustness to FB's panopticon, it blows everything out of the water

2) the geolocation of random imagery allows facebook to build out a sparse pointcloud suitable for generating cityscale visual positioning.

3) the anonymisation pipeline they have is also very good.

<comment><USER17> I tend to agree with this. Facebook also silently acquired the very amibitious UK startup called [https://www.scape.io/](https://www.scape.io/) whose mission was VPS = Visual Positioning System. Their SDK/APIs allowed to build AR app easily, but now they're part of FB. That makes me think that its AR which is here at play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well worth a read. The article considers why facebook bought this. Maybe to help _other_ competitors to facebook, cause they will be giving away all their mapping data for commercial use now.

<comment><USER19> You mean other Google competitors, not FB competitors, right?

<comment><USER18> Yes, sorry, it could help other competitors to Google, like other mapping companies

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> to get to the other side of the road?</comment>


When is a video game too difficult? - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/b17fdf3a-411e-11ea-a879-e56a76ed3e8a <comment><USER2> I can't read the article, so I'll just offer my answer to the headline:

A video game is too difficult when the difficulty makes it less fun to play.</comment>


Computational performance — a beginner's case study - <AUTHOR> http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/07/computational-performanc-a-beginners-case-study/ <comment><USER2> I was appalled at the Stack Overflow answer; thankfully the author corrected it. This sort of exercise is a first homework assignment in a computer architecture course.

It's worth remembering that C is an abstraction. Even assembly is an abstraction. If you care about performance, you need to understand the limitations of the abstraction level you're working at - where your abstraction leaks, and what it is that leaks through.

<comment><USER3> The SO answer is still not correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a good article, because it illustrates the counter-intuitive aspect of computer programming. We would think initially that they both should take the same amount of time, but due to the way information is represented in the computer, the times are vastly different.

<comment><USER5> What would be even better is if the compiler could realize that the loops are independent of each other and compiled either way to the better machine code. I don't think that'd be possible with C, but possibly C# or Java could have the JIT engine recognize such a scenario and make the proper optimization.

<comment><USER2> It is possible with C.

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

[http://gcc.igor.onlinedirect.bg/summit/2004/High%20Level%20L...](http://gcc.igor.onlinedirect.bg/summit/2004/High%20Level%20Loop%20Optimizations.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Oh cool, thanks for sharing. I learn something new every day here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice article, I know I for one can give these issues little thought when coding at a higher level of abstraction but certainly necessary knowledge for performance critical code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given a large enough performance difference (and non-pathological code), is the answer ever "fewer op codes"?

</comment><comment><USER7> That's why you have swizzling in textures (grouping close pixels (left,right,up,down) in close proximity).</comment>


Searching Entry-Level OSS Organizations? - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/2kabhishek/searching-entry-level-oss-organizations-hg6 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking for Open Source Organizations on GitHub/Gitlab for new contributors.

P.S - First post here too</comment>


Lime and Ash - <AUTHOR> https://jonhmchan.com/blog/2017/7/14/lime-and-ash <comment><USER2> You've started a mediation practice and you pledge to write more often. Where are you taking the time from? What are you giving up?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wake up earlier. Both the meditation and pledge to write take up an extra hour in my day. It's causing me to readjust my old habits too: if I don't sleep late and get a good night's sleep, waking up earlier is easier and I can make the time.

I'm curious to see how this evolves in future weeks.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I'm curious how it works out as well.

I'm not longer willing to regularly give up sleep. For me, it's more important than just about anything I would replace it with.

So, if I wanted to add 30 minutes of exercise into my day, I would have to subtract 30 mins of something else and there just aren't many things that I want to give up anymore.

I wish I could afford to be retired. I could retire and easily replace my working hours with making things and learning things and writing and reading and playing music, watching movies and travel and other hobbies. Maybe I'll buy a lottery ticket on the way home from work.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Would You Explain HN to a Two-Year-Old? - <AUTHOR> I was on HN this morning and my 2 yr. old son asked me "What's that orange thing papa's looking at?"
I answered "It's a place where people can talk to each other about things they find interesting." He didn't get it, which makes sense since it isn't really a "place" and there are no visible "people" here.
So I figured I would propose it to you all, how would you explain HN to a 2 year old? <comment><USER2> If I had the time (and I probably would because I consider it important), I would just go down the rabbit hole and explain the internet in the simplest terms possible. You press some buttons and other people around the world see the buttons you pushed and they press some buttons and you can see them too. With every new inevitable question, just keep explaining in terms the child is able to understand, and keep going until one gets tired of it. You can then say it's enough for then and you can continue some other time.

I consider curiosity in a child to be a valuable resource to nurture. If you make it a positive experience for the child, he'll want to do it again. Careful not to appear annoyed, because then, as it resulted in a negative experience, the child will know to avoid doing such things in the future.

<comment><USER3> 2YO kids do not ask that because they are curious to know how the internet works. They could not care less about the internet. They care about their parents' attention.

<comment><USER2> Right. And the parent can take advantage of that to nurture their curiosity. Asking questions and learning (however little or even just trying) == having a good time with dad.

Making them associate that behavior of curiosity with having a positive experience is what I consider to be important here.

Plus, you also get to flex those brain muscles. Even if nothing seems to stick now, I imagine it does help them learn in the long-run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _He didn 't get it, which makes sense since it isn't really a "place" and > there are no visible "people" here._

Looks to me like the two-year-old is the one explaining it to _you_.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is definitely true. Every time an explanation falls flat, I realize how I don't really understand the thing I am trying to explain...

<comment><USER4> That's why you catch bugs when you document code, or explain it to others in a review process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If he's seen a bulletin board with fliers pinned to it or if you put things up on the refrigerator with magnets, bring him there. Then hand him, you, and anyone around a stack of post-it notes. Explain to him that HN is a place where anyone can put up something to show people. If people want to respond, they can write their name + message and attach it to the posting or another post-it note. BUT it's on the Internet! That means that anyone from anywhere at anytime can put up postings and post-it notes!

This opens up a bridge to him asking, "what's the internet?" To which you now have endless possibilities on introducing your son to the wonderful world of technology :)

</comment><comment><USER6> My 2 year old is just happy to talk on the computer mouse like it's a phone.

Not sure where I would start other than "daddy reading".

<comment><USER7> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9kTVZiJ3Uc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9kTVZiJ3Uc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd take him outside and give him a stick to play with instead :-) That used to bring a smile to my 2yr old's face who is now 22 and finishing a computing degree. It's a special time when the kids are that age.

I remember when my son was little having him help me pull ethernet cable through our roofspace ceiling. As the cable kept coming through the hole in the ceiling as he pulled he shouted up to me, "Dad, is this magic?" :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> When a 2YO asks you something like that it's time to close the laptop and switch to something he can relate to.

</comment><comment><USER9> "You know how, in daycare, you read stories, talk with your friends and play?"

"HN is like daycare for me! I come here to read stories and talk to my friends, but my friends live all over the world."

</comment><comment><USER10> "A horrible place where people go to misunderstand eachother"

</comment><comment><USER11> "Just something daddy likes to read"

My kid is a few months shy of 3 and I don't think there's anything of value to tell him about the internet at this point. Once he can read I'll probably explain more to him.

</comment><comment><USER12> My son's 2, I just tell him I'm reading. Unless there's pictures he isn't really interested.

I'm not sure I could get into much more detail than that, perhaps a library metaphor?

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd say it's where dad talks to other grown-ups.

</comment><comment><USER14> If a 2 year old understands stories, HN is a place where people read stories, share stories, talk about stories and pick their favorite stories.

If a 2 year old is interested in HN, it might be because he/she is trying to see what's more interesting than them.

</comment><comment><USER15> A digital bulletin board, show him a real one the next time you are at the coffee shop.

Under each posting, which are articles (shared information) not solicitations (asking to buy or sell services), people are having conversations.

You could give the example of people leaving post-it notes for each other.

</comment><comment><USER16> Different case but I usually open up HN while eating in non English speaking restaurant alone and the staff wonders what I'm reading and I just say tech news site.

</comment><comment><USER17> "It's a web site where people discuss stories. Here, let me read to you some of the things people are writing to each other. If it's not interesting, we can read something else."

</comment><comment><USER18> You know how books have stories? This is like a lot of books, where the stories are told by people like grandma. We can just pick which story we want to read and ask them questions about it.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's a website for boffins to talk to other boffins. You can then follow this up with explaining what a boffin is and if daddy is one!

</comment><comment><USER20> Your son wants to engage with you in a positive way.

Children at this age ask "why" questions often in rapid succession. I am not sure it actually matters what the "best answer" is. What is likely important to him is that you are engaging with him.

<comment><USER17> The why comes a bit later, around 4. Is it still ok to link to Louie CK?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8idwyuVJ4ug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8idwyuVJ4ug)

<comment><USER21> My 2.5-year-old asks why after every sentence, including the answer to the last time she asked why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I just saw you ask this question yesterday. On your profile it says indeed that this thread is a day old. But here it says it's two hours old. And all of the old responses from yesterday have had their timing reset, "10 minutes ago" \-- I definitely remember that boffin comment from yesterday because it made me look up the word.

What happened?

<comment><USER2> You're right. I didn't write my comment today (it was either yesterday or the day before). Yet, I see it says I wrote it 12 minutes ago. Weird.

<comment><AUTHOR> After I explained what HN is to my son he hacked into the db and started messing with time stamps

<comment><AUTHOR> But seriously that is strange

<comment><USER23> I've noticed similar things before a couple of times. (Like a comment changing from a day to 10 minutes old) Maybe they're doing site maintenance or changing stuff at the time...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> People write about cool things and you can read about cool things. The cooler a thing is the more people look at it.

Keep your vocab limited when explaining to kids. Otherwise you'll go down a rabbit hole of "what does that mean". Which is fine if you want to do that, but a 2 year old isn't going to remember a lot of it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Tell him its kind of like Lightning Mc Queen connecting to Mater and gang to ask for help when he is out racing and has trouble winning.

</comment><comment><USER26> Three more years and the kid will be online on his smartphone. Don't worry about it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't know - I was aware of BBS'es by the time I was 2; that's where I got my games from! I'd just say that you talk to other people through it, because they show you fun things to read.

</comment><comment><USER28> My advice, as the father of a ten year old, would be to get off hacker news and enjoy every second of having an amazing two year old! It's a wonderful time and it flies by.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would say it's a place where people who spend a lot of time on the internet try to gain status by posting comments which they expect to be upvoted.

</comment><comment><USER30> It depends which toolset the 2 year old is currently using.

<comment><AUTHOR> His stack is basically: Brio, Lego, Crayola, and Hotwheels.

<comment><USER31> Full stack then, he can build stuff fully from the ground up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Maybe just play with him, I bet he doesn't care at all about some bullshit orange thingy, but your attention.

</comment><comment><USER33> "A place where people can leave notes to others that can also read them on a computer like mine."

No need to overthink this. Kid just wanted your attention.

</comment><comment><USER34> A website where people post random stuff on. People supposed to discuss on topics posted but the discussion deviates in random directions anyway.

</comment><comment><USER35> I find it amazing that your son was able to say "What's that orange thing papa's looking at?" at only 2 years.

</comment><comment><USER36> Tell him it's how Daddy sucks his thumb

</comment><comment><USER37> I won't.</comment>


A half hour to learn Rust - <AUTHOR> https://fasterthanli.me/articles/a-half-hour-to-learn-rust <comment><USER2> Thanks, its helping. Using Debian derived Bunsen Linux, Emacs (in Terminator), trying to learn Rust. Moving along at glacial speed...</comment>


Lambda is a poor EC2 substitute. But it still has a place. - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1178451720055095296 <comment><USER2> ...and Lambda is a great substitute for having a DevOps person for an early stage startup.

(feel free to ignore this if you're a K8s grandmaster... but for the rest of us mortals lambda is quite nice)

<comment><AUTHOR> K8 grandmaster?

If you can run your app on your laptop, you can run it on EC2.</comment></comment>


Amazon makes offer to Hatchette authors – to cut out Hatchette - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2014/07/08/amazon-makes-a-direct-offer-to-hachette-authors-heres-the-full-letter/

<comment><USER2> Nothing on the merit of the article, but the actual name of the publisher is "Hachette", not "Hatchette". The title looks like a hatchet job currently...

</comment><comment><USER3> Giving the authors 100% of the profit is a great negotiating move, it really bring to light how much the authors are getting screwed now in terms of book profits. Also Amazon makes it clear to everyone they don't care about the money as much as Hachette.</comment>


Steve Ballmer to buy LA Clippers for $2 billion - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-sn-clippers-sale-ballmer-20140529-story.html <comment><USER2> He should rename them to the LA Clippys.

(I know I'm risking downvotes by posting this. But c'mon.)

<comment><USER3> Hi there! It looks like you're trying to play basketball.

<comment><USER4> Hahaha let me buy you a drink sometime for this comment. It seriously made my day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If the Clippers are worth $2 billion I can't even imagine what the Bulls, Lakers, or Heat would cost on the open market. I wonder if the increase in value over the past few decades relates to the fact that live sporting events drive such a huge premium in today's consume at your own pace media culture.

<comment><USER6> Lakers? More. Others? Not as much. The only other NBA team worth that kinda scratch is the Knicks. Ballmer WAY overpaid for a second tier team that happened to be in a prime market. He should seriously consider renaming and rebranding it as soon as possible.

<comment><USER3> The Heat are the reigning dynasty with three of the best players in the league on one team surrounded by an all-star cast. They'd at least tie the Lakers in cost. But yeah, the Clippers are second-tier relative to some of the talent out there, I agree with that.

<comment><USER6> The Lakers have a ton of championships that have gotten them a MASSIVE following and they're in the largest market in the country. The Heat are nowhere remotely close to being as valuable. This isn't a matter of talent, it's a matter of history, brand loyalty, advertising, and all the money that comes with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Damn, I think it's one of the best return on investment in the sport industry! As the owner of the team do you get any share of the derived products? I bet it can be quite a nice amount if so, probably nothing compared to the TV contracts though. Question is, can the Clippers generate more than 2B for Steve? Is it a pure buzz/fame investment or real money making machine?

</comment><comment><USER8> What's remarkable about this whole affair is that when all is said and done, one can step back and see the following:

A guy bought an NBA team for $12.5 million in 1981, made some horribly racist remarks in 2014, and then realized a 160x return on his investment because of those remarks and the attention they brought to the team.

Quite a world we live in, eh?

<comment><USER9> It's a 16.6% CAGR - very good, but less astronomical than looking at simply the multiple of the original purchase amount.

<comment><USER10> 16.6% CAGR over 33 years _is_ astronomical. Apple, one of the most successful corporations in history, has achieved an 18.95% CAGR since its launch in 1984. $100,000 invested in Apple in 1984 yields $18 million today. You can play with that here: [http://forio.com/contour/examples/investment/investment.html](http://forio.com/contour/examples/investment/investment.html)

Achieving a double digit CAGR over multiple decades is extremely rare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Get on your feet" should be played with the lineups before each game.

Seriously, though, content is being bifurcated into "live, can't find/steal online" and everything else. The former is apparently worth a lot these days.

</comment><comment><USER12> DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

<comment><USER13> DRIBBLERS! DRIBBLERS! DRIBBLERS! DRIBBLERS! DRIBBLERS! haha ; o )

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What an abject waste of money.</comment>


Why Are There So Many More Species on Land When the Sea Is Bigger? (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/07/why-are-there-so-many-more-species-on-land-than-in-the-sea/533247/ <comment><USER2> Do we know this for sure?

How much of the total land mass of the planet has been explored, and all available species calculated?

How much of the total water mass has been explored, and all available species calculated?

I suspect the percentage of the latter is many orders of magnitude smaller than the former, so I am not at all convinced of the premise.

<comment><USER3> To me it would make sense if it was indeed true. Mainly because on land there is a huge variation in possible ecological niches. The sea, including both the seabed and the surface, look kind of homogeneous in comparison.

Another interesting factor is that moving around is much harder on land (both above ground and underground) and so also the density of prey-predators that can coexist in a given territory.

This does not invalidate (nor address) any of your point. Just some reflection on the topic.</comment></comment>


Three Little Circles - <AUTHOR> http://mbostock.github.com/d3/tutorial/circle.html

<comment><USER2> This is a really fantastic way of providing examples. It's very well written and everything just works, and it's very simple and easy to understand. I wish the Processing.js docs looked like this.

<comment><USER3> I concur, great example documentation like this makes it so much more appealing to dive into the library with clear goals and not worry about whether I'm using it correctly.

D3 looks very nifty - I'd like to investigate building a Google Motion Chart- type widget with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> D3.js powers all of the visualizations at Metamarkets, thanks to Vadim Ogievetsky, who got an early look at the D3 code base. It's a powerful framework that extends beyond visualizations: it can be used to attach data to any part of the DOM, not just SVG elements.

Here's one example that weaves together both data and graphics: <http://labs.metamx.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'll say it now: Mike Bostock is easily on par with Ashkenas, Holowaychuck, or Dahl as far as productivity and genius. d3 is a mindtrip but über-powerful in much the same way as Backbone, and Polymaps is the future.

<comment><USER6> I couldn't agree more. Check out the tools he has built: <http://bost.ocks.org/mike/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Those examples look awesome! Has anyone used this who can comment?

<comment><USER8> I run a small information visualization shop and we use Protovis & D3 exclusively for visualizations on the web. Bostock's work is the most useful and thoughtful visualization framework on any platform, and at this point the only reason I use Hadley Wickam's ggplot2 is for graphics that need more marks than Chrome can handle on the DOM.

Initially I didn't see what D3 offered over Protovis, but I've since come around---D3 code is closer to the underlying page elements that make up the visualization, so you can leverage your existing HTML/SVG and CSS knowledge. Also, unlike Protovis, D3 has animation baked in by creating/removing DOM elements and tweening their positions and sizes.

The latest public-facing work we did using D3 is this linked treemap & linechart, which uses both HTML elements (treemap divs) and SVG elements (linechart lines):

<http://keminglabs.com/ukuni/>

<comment><USER9> I'm not a Javascript expert and I don't know D3 so I may be missing something here. I'm trying to add a d3 matcher for <http://underthesite.com/>, referenced in a contemporary thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746864>

Here's the matcher:

<http://underthesite.com/technologies/d3/matchers/161>

It fails to detect that <http://keminglabs.com/ukuni/> uses d3. What's missing from the matcher? I notice that there's no script tag for d3 in the ukuni main page source.

<comment><USER8> That's because D3 is minified and concatenated with the rest of our JavaScript on the page. jQuery is separate so that it will load from caches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it'd be pretty rad to use this API to visualize connections and tweet's and thing's that can be represented in a timeline. So much amazing client side stuff that we can do now. Coupling this with <http://geoiplookup.wikimedia.org/> might be fun :)</comment>


California sues Cisco alleging discrimination based on India's caste system - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-02/california-sues-cisco-bias-indian-caste-system <comment><USER2> Discussion 10 days ago (600+ comments):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23697083) "California accuses Cisco of job discrimination based on Indian employee's caste"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for this. I must have missed it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting because this is not the first time I've heard that Indians in Cisco are extremely cliquey. Definitely remember hearing story of a workplace discrimination settlement from there. In that case it was argued in the gender angle, but the person involved said it's actually a group of Indians who were allegedly pulling all stops to promote each other while trying to exclude other Asians.

I'm from India, and can totally believe it. Have also heard of stories in Texas where they will keep a trusted Indian guy in interview panels to make sure that it's not a cousin or friend (who only barely looks like the interviewee) actually coming for the interview. And then there are these "consulting firms" who specialise in helping you fake a resume and get a job (most of the time these are people who won the H1 lottery and have come to the US via Infosys/TCS and are trying to switch to a real job instead of the half- pay serfdom they are in). These shenanigans are of course not common nowadays, but what this means is there's a big population of disingenuous Indian origin people in the second-grade tech jobs in the US, which does not bode well for the general image of Indian tech workers unfortunately.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've sadly heard stories about forced deference, though not seemingly as overt as in Cisco, at other tech companies.

The most shocking experience is actually a personal anecdote. Someone from India from a client once asked my father, who also works in tech in a senior position, why people listen to him given his background. Kind of jarring given that the discrimination in the US tends to be much more structural and sinisterly subtle as opposed to some Indian or South African style outright "one drop rule" thing.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused. Was it about the Indian's background, or your father's background?

<comment><AUTHOR> Specifically with reference to my dad's background and why people in the US at large, including the native population, let him be in charge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This will be an interesting case because it will need to test how a construct like caste maps on to the protected classes of US anti discrimination law. There's plenty of overlap between caste and many US protected classes, including race, class, and religion, but there is not a tight fit to any of them.

Perhaps countries like the UK have more experience with this, because they have proportionally much larger and older Indian populations, and also the UK has its own historical hereditary caste like system.

<comment><USER6> It's the equivalent of hiring white supremacists and letting them make employment decisions.

<comment><USER5> Kind of, except with caste the "racial" categories have repeatedly both smoothed out and discretized over the millenia, though always with a with a hierarchy. It's a far more complicated system of discrimination and social ordering than the traditional black/white dichotomy of American discrimination.

<comment><USER6> Sophistication doesn't make racism better.

<comment><USER5> I didn't mean to imply it was better. If anything it is even worse because it attempts to hide the aspects of it that come from racism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry to say it, but I believe there will always be groups of people who unjustifiably feel they are superior to another group of people.

<comment><USER4> People in the US can feel however they want, but they don't get to discriminate on the basis of protected group status.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The suit alleges that Iyer told other workers the employee was Dalit and had gained entry into the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology through affirmative action."

Indian law explicitly requires a much lower standard of admission for the lower castes. Is it illegal to take consideration of this fact?

<comment><USER9> I couldn't read the article because of the paywall.

I'm going to assume the person in question graduated from IIT as well as gained entry. If so, I don't see how it matters if he got in through a door with a lower bar, if he graduated, he graduated. Unless graduating from IIT is a rubber stamp for showing up?

Also, just because the bar is lower for admissions doesn't mean that people who cleared the bar couldn't have cleared the bar otherwise. I don't see how IIT entrance exam scores are relevant for employment at Cisco anyway.

<comment><USER10> It depends on what theory you believe about why a university degree is valuable. If you see it as a competitive signal of how many people a candidate was better than, then the signal is contaminated.

<comment><USER4> One might feel the same about an African American graduate of MIT, but it'd be illegal to discriminate based on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's an interesting situation.

Discrimination based on something not common in one country can still have negative impacts.... but perhaps it hasn't been sorted out legally in our country yet?

We live in a strange global world.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yeah well sounds about right, entirely possible.

</comment><comment><USER13> Will this be a precedent setting case?

</comment><comment><USER14> _Laughs in Californian_

</comment><comment><USER15> This is rich coming from a state that introduced a bill like ACA-5.

</comment><comment> dis-sys shocking but still confused. When they practiced the indian caste system in the US, how would they interact with people not from india, e.g. people with US, EU, Vietnam, Korea etc background? Do they get treated as "high caste" or "low caste" people?

<comment><USER16> Caste is highly correlated to skin pigmentation, so in practice... this would be almost indistinguishable from regular old racism.

<comment><USER17> It's not at all highly correlated, and skin color certainly wouldn't trump real caste affiliation.

<comment><USER4> Please see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23799512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23799512) for a recent paper which reports that it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As a Hindu I'd like to take the opportunity to share that the implementation of the caste system is not based on what it really means to be Hindu. The Vedas state that one's caste is fluid (not based on lineage) and can change in one's lifetime, and that further a person of the worker class is not lesser than someone of the priest caste, they both perform dharma necessary for the community.

<comment> dis-sys are you defending the caste system?

<comment><USER19> caste system would have no problems. Caste discrimination is the problem. Every religion and Entire world has caste system in one form or the other. otherwise there would be no fights.

<comment><USER20> > _Every religion and Entire world has caste system in one form or the other._

Except one thing isn't like another. If you think otherwise, I'd appreciate examples.

> _caste system would have no problems. Caste discrimination is the problem._

That's like saying, apartheid isn't the problem, the ensuing discrimination is?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/world/americas/dominican-republic-garbage.html <comment><USER2> My wife and I were traveling in Borneo a few years back. They have "water villages" there where all the houses are built on stilts in shallow water. You could not see the shore because it was completely covered in a layer of garbage. It was like living on top of a landfill. At first I thought it was garbage thrown out by the villagers, but it's not. It was garbage that washes in on the tide. Every now and then the villagers try to clean it up, only to be overwhelmed by a new batch. We were told that it only takes a few weeks for the garbage to completely cover the shore again. It was heartbreaking.

[UPDATE] Here's a photo: [http://www.flownet.com/ron/trips/Borneo/Images/165.jpg](http://www.flownet.com/ron/trips/Borneo/Images/165.jpg)

<comment><USER3> This photo is surreal. I can't believe a trash filled planet is becoming a reality and we are doing little to nothing to stop it.

<comment><USER4> Please, the Western world is doing a lot of work in keeping it out of water ways and oceans. The majority of trash is from China and other Asian countries. [1]

What can we do? Simple, this is where trade requirements include treating the environment right. We already have restrictions on seafood harvesting and protecting certain species like whales and dolphins. no reason we cannot hold trade to require proper handling of waste and pollution to include penalties and fees on offending nations

[1] [https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-13/5-countries-dump- more...](https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-13/5-countries-dump-more-plastic- oceans-rest-world-combined)

<comment><USER5> To be fair, part of the way we "take care" of it is by shipping a bunch of it's trash to China [0].

[0] [https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/why-china-isnt-taking- amer...](https://bigthink.com/philip-perry/why-china-isnt-taking-americas- garbage-anymore-literally)

<comment><USER6> I mean, true in the most technical sense, but given the Chinese paid an estimated half billion dollars for it in 2016 [1], the implication that it's being dumped there is disingenuous.

[1] [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-bans- foreig...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-bans-foreign- waste-but-what-will-happen-to-the-worlds-recycling/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious. Quotes from the article:

\--

"It happens pretty much all the time if there is a strong rainfall or a storm,"

The phenomenon is not confined to the Dominican Republic, he said, and can be seen in many developing nations with a coastline. "Everybody uses the rivers and the beaches as dump sites." \--

So we're being told that ocean's plastic garbage patch is somehow made out of the contents of landfills around the globe (and western countries) making it into the ocean with rain water. To anyone who has seen a landfill in real life that looks wildly improbable, except for a very minuscule amount of material.

I feel like developing countries using ocean as a waste dump is much more likely to be the true cause of the garbage patch.

<comment><USER8> There was a recent study which has been circulating. Most (90%) of the plastics in the ocean that are not related to fishing equipment come from 8 rivers in Asia and then the Nile and Niger rivers in Africa. Mostly due to poor or unregulated waste disposal infrastructures.

<comment><USER9> Can you link the study? Why do they believe that's the case? Is it just the lack of a waste disposal infrastructure?

<comment><USER10> A simple google search yields:

[https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic- polluti...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting- our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/)

[https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean- comes-...](https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-from- just-10-rivers/a-41581484)

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the- plas...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic- tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've wondered for a time, why we put so much energy into banning certain plastic items, instead of improving biodegradable plastic technologies in conjunction with efficient trash sorting at waste management plants.

If we can replace most plastics with biodegradable forms, a large part of these issues go away completely within our lifetime; plastics decomposing in as little as 24 months![1]

> According to a 2010 EPA report, 12.4%, or 31 million tons, of all municipal > solid waste (MSW) is plastic. 8.2% of that, or 2.55 million tons, were > recovered[1]

A large part of our recycling problem is that it's entirely dependent on people doing the right thing and putting recyclable materials in the correct bin. Why not have machines that can sort recyclables from true decompostable trash? Plastics tend to float, glass tends to sink, tin and many other metals are magnetic... etc. Removing a dependence on people to remember what's recyclable and where to dispose of used items would be a huge win for the environment.

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

<comment><USER12> The problem with Biodegradable plastic is that it still requires a special process to break it down. You can't just toss it in the ocean and have it magically break down. Compostable materials are the ideal.

<comment><USER11> > The problem with Biodegradable plastic is that it still requires a special > process to break it down

That's not true, actually. From the article:

> A peer-reviewed report of the work shows 91% biodegradation in a soil > environment within 24 months, when tested in accordance with ISO 17556

> Under proper conditions, some biodegradable plastics can degrade to the > point where microorganisms can completely metabolise them to carbon dioxide > (and water). For example, starch-based bioplastics produced from sustainable > farming methods could be almost carbon neutral.

<comment><USER13> The ocean is not a soil environment; so it degrading well in soil doesn't necessarily help if it is a waste stream that ends up in the ocean.

<comment><USER11> The article references starch-based bioplastics - and the ocean is quite an environment, filled with micro-organisms and minerals which readily decompose other organic materials.

I don't see a reason we cannot create something that works in that environment too - however, the overwhelming majority of our plastic waste isn't going into the ocean; rather, it's going into landfills where it will sit for thousands of years.

<comment><USER14> Things sitting in landfills are not a problem for the environment. It is producing them in the first place that causes environmental damage. Imagine everything going into a landfill as a resource our ancestors can mine in the future.

<comment><USER11> > Things sitting in landfills are not a problem for the environment

That's not true either.

Toxins, leachate, and greanhouse gases are given off from landfills and leach into ground water, or pollute the land around landfills[1]. Plastics will stay there, be washed away into streams/rivers, or be unburied in the future, practically in the same condition they were originally - even hundreds or thousands of years in the future.

> Products that are not biodegradable or are slow to decompose, like plastic, > can remain in landfill sites for centuries, often emitting gases that could > be harmful to the environment.[2]

> Landfills and dumps buried over often become suburban home sites in later > years, unbeknownst to people who may live on them. Landfills have a > distinctive effect on air pollution, nature, land and humans. Soil in the > area may be saturated with chemicals or hazardous substances[3]

[1] [https://environmentvictoria.org.au/resource/problem- landfill...](https://environmentvictoria.org.au/resource/problem-landfill/)

[2] [https://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/How_Does_Recycling_Affect...](https://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/How_Does_Recycling_Affect_the_Environment)

[3] [https://sciencing.com/effects-landfills- environment-8662463....](https://sciencing.com/effects-landfills- environment-8662463.html)

<comment><USER14> I guess I should have said, "Putting things into a recently (last 30is years) constructed landfill with methane capture is not a problem for the environment. The point is putting things into landfills is a great alternative to just releasing them into the environment. The major problem with stuff, from an environmental view, is not its disposal in well designed landfills, but surface dumping and the problems with how its made and transported.

<comment><USER13> > I guess I should have said, "Putting things into a recently (last 30is > years) constructed landfill with methane capture is not a problem for the > environment.

Well, other than the problem that landfills will need to continue increase in size and consume the entire environment, and the environmental impact of converting land into landfills in the first place, that might be approximately correct.

> The point is putting things into landfills is a great alternative to just > releasing them into the environment.

In the sense that being kicked in the genitals is a great alternative to having cigarettes put out on them, sure, but neither is _good_ from an environmental point of view.

<comment><USER14> The total US garbage production in 2016 was 254 million tons[1]. If you assume that compacted garbage has about the density of water(hard to find good figures for this), then all of the garbage for the US for one year can be fit into a space of about 2.30E+08 cubic meters. This works out to a square mile, 300ft thick. A huge pile of trash and would be large to walk around it on a human scale, but geologically an almost infinitesimal amount of the Earth surface.

I would say that current US farmland is about as destructive to the natural environment as a properly designed covered landfill, give or take. With about 1.5 million square miles of farmland in the US, landfill use for a hundred years of US dumping is about 15,000 times less of a problem than farming for the environment. Garbage is very visible and a visceral expression of humans impact on the planet, but farming, ranching, and housing uses of land are the real destroyers of the natural environment, not how we dispose of all the crap we make (in the US at least).

[1] [https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/trash- number...](https://www.treehugger.com/environmental-policy/trash-numbers- startling-statistics-about-americans-and-their-garbage.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article title and introduction is pretty misleading, as only halfway the article it is revealed that "the plastic waste washing onto Montesinos Beach comes from the Ozama River". So while this is obviously an example of plastic reaching the ocean to form a garbage patch, the article's examples of beaches filled with plastic are not a result of the patches reaching the shore again.

</comment><comment><USER16> The title makes you believe that this garbage comes from somewhere else, across the ocean, but it's actually coming from their own river into which everybody is dumping waste.

<comment><USER17> I'm assuming you don't know how oceans work. Eventually, we'll all be ingesting that.

<comment><USER18> Do you mean people that eat seafood will be ingesting that, or are you thinking of some other means by which we will be ingesting it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I didn't realise how big of a problem it was until Blue Planet II last year, and then earlier this year I stayed in Unawatuna, and the hotel had a small private beach that is cleared of plastic daily, and it was covered again within hours. I didn't take any photos of the litter directly, but in the top- left of this photo: [https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg7qXxyH-2c/?taken- by=unfunco](https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg7qXxyH-2c/?taken-by=unfunco) it is somewhat visible.

It's endless, it'll just keep washing up for the foreseeable future. In the UK you're now vilified if you ask for a plastic bag to carry your shopping home, and the pubs and bars near me no longer offer plastic straws, I'm fine with this, but our waste is an almost literal drop in the ocean compared to the waste being dumped in rivers and oceans by developing nations.

</comment><comment><USER20> > Mr. Gutsch said that recycling was a short-term solution and amounted to > only a bandage. Parley for the Oceans advocates phasing out single-use > plastic altogether.

This is the key. We must hold the companies producing single use plastics responsible for the massive amounts of toxic waste they dump on our planet. For too long, they have been allowed to pass the responsibility and blame on to the consumer. Recycling programs have not been sufficiently successful. It's time to stop the problem at the source.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The plastic waste washing onto Montesinos Beach comes from the Ozama River, > which flows into the Caribbean nearby, one of those in charge of the > cleanup, Gen. Rafael Antonio Carrasco, told Reuters.

Maybe I misread this, but it sounds like the source of the garbage is relatively local.

It's not the Great Garbage Patch or anything like that, it's the DR's own garbage they they throw in the Ozama River that's washing up ashore.

</comment><comment><USER22> Natgeo recently published this great data visualization / article on the ocean's plastic and where it comes from: [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/the- jour...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/06/the-journey-of- plastic-around-the-globe/?beta=true)

</comment><comment><USER23> Same thing happened in Mumbai a week back. The monsoon rains pulled back all the trash. [http://observers.france24.com/en/20180720-video-mumbai- ocean...](http://observers.france24.com/en/20180720-video-mumbai-ocean- rubbish-trash)

Also the Dominican Republic is pretty developed country but in neighboring Haiti things are in pretty bad shape. I saw in a Youtube video by somebody who went there on an eco tour the piles on garbage on a river. He said the garbage was so bad you could walk across the river on the garbage. I can't locate the video clip anymore.

<comment><USER24> I was in Haiti. This is true, mounds and mounds of styrafoam lunch disposal because there is NO place to put garbage. If it is collected it's burned. The people will burn it themselves because again there is no place to collect it.

<comment><USER25> Ditto. Haiti's beaches near the city center were HORRIBLE. The only people on the beaches were poor folks trying to find scraps. Didn't help that they functioned as a de facto dump as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> And nearly every other beach in the world. The amount of trash on shorelines, floating around, embedded in reef, etc is staggering.

The next time you're on vacation in the Caribbean, SE Asia, or South Pacific, wake up extra early and head out to the shoreline before any clean-up crews arrive to rake up the garbage (and seaweed). Or just visit an unmaintained beach away from resorts where tides work in favor of the garbage coming ashore and where the trash is never picked up. The oceans (and rivers which flow into them) are treated like a giant garbage dump in most of the world, and it shows.

</comment><comment><USER14> While plastic in the ocean is a big problem, this amount of pollution is a local problem. It could be completely fixed by local people with known methods. "The plastic waste washing onto Montesinos Beach comes from the Ozama River, which flows into the Caribbean nearby." Caribbean beaches and the Gulf coast in general do not have beach pollution like this.

</comment><comment><USER27> In a number of poorer regions in developing countries I've been too people don't have the capability or perhaps knowledge to properly dispose of garbage so it ends up on the side of the road, which eventually makes its way into rivers and the ocean.

</comment><comment><USER28> Nice bit of auto playing video at the bottom of the article (picture worth a thousand words) or could have been an GIF.

My first thought was it looks like a great problem for some robots — they need a small fleet of floating Rhombas.

<comment><USER29> There are devices for scooping trash out of rivers, I don't know how well they could be adapted for the ocean.

[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash- wheels-...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/02/mr-trash-wheels- professor-trash-wheels-baltimore-harbor-ocean-trash-pickup/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why can't they organize a weekly trash service and tell all people to stack the trash at the end of the road?

<comment><USER31> Culture, Money, and Infrastructure (the latter of which requires a combination of Money and Time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I bet if this happened in major US or Chinese beaches they'd actually enact policies to curb this dumping.

</comment><comment><USER33> It reminds me of George Carlin save the planet: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c)

</comment><comment><USER34> Most probably created in China, used on the West then dumped in the sea...

<comment><USER35> It says in the article it's from the Ozama river which is a local river that runs into the sea nearby.

<comment><USER36> I read that in the article, then i checked it on google maps [https://goo.gl/maps/pVJeXBUE4Ck](https://goo.gl/maps/pVJeXBUE4Ck) . It's still hard to believe so much trash can wind up on a beach through that river. Wait, what does the river look like? Should they just install a shallow net?

It's crazy

<comment><USER27> They should stop dumping trash in the river

<comment><USER37> Easier said than done. First you have to develop the infrastructure (garbage trucks, dumps, entire departments in local government, etc...). Then you have to convince the villagers to change their way of life through littering fines that everybody will hate.

I don't think anybody is happy with the situation, but practical alternatives are in short supply. Worse, you have to apply the situation throughout the whole country or the people who follow the law but still get smothered in garbage from upstream will be angry and disincentiveized to continue trying to clean up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So the fish we consume is most probably consuming garbage and plastic. Veganism to the rescue?

<comment><USER39> It's precisely why my wife and I no longer eat meat.</comment></comment>


(Pidgin's) SSL support appears to have been written by a lobotomy victim - <AUTHOR> http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/15308

<comment><USER2> Besides being rude, this clearly does not follow Pidgin's security vulnerability reporting process: <http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/SecurityVulnerabilityProcess>

<comment> mike-cardwell Yes, unnecessarily rude and offensive to the developer(s) who wrote it. If he'd just used a more respectful title and removed the last sentence it would have been fine.

<comment><USER3> No, it wouldn't have been fine. If you find a security bug, you have to follow the reporting procedures. Otherwise you're just making things worse. This should not be in a public ticket.

That aside, I have a hard time seeing that there's any level of rudeness this sort of code doesn't deserve.

<comment><USER4> Exposing a technically misguided decision as such is enough.

No need for the spluttering outrage and emotional editorial comment by the bug reporter (to say nothing of the _ad hominem_ attacks on the programmer).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "If you don't look carefully, it may appear that the NSS plugin doesn't do any validation of the SSL certificates, but that isn't the case; the validation is done, just not by the SSL_AuthCertificateHook hook."

</comment><comment><USER6> This bug report appears to have been written by a lobotomy victim who has had their "communicating with humans" part of the brain removed.</troll>

It makes me so sad to see this kind of attitude. And usually (don't know about this case) it comes from a person who does not contribute to the project.

Not everyone is a cryptographer. Although they should refrain from writing crypto code, calling them "lobotomy victims" makes you sound like one.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why isn't libpurple, being a library, licensed under the LGPL, instead of the GPL? If it were, then there would be no problem linking with OpenSSL if I understand things correctly.

<comment><USER8> libpurple was not always separate from Pidgin (née Gaim). Relicensing is hard.

<comment><USER9> "Relicensing GPL code is hard." FTFY.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read this entire article in my interior Comic Shop Guy voice.

</comment><comment><USER11> Really insulting headline. flagged

<comment><USER12> It's a really insulting bug report!</comment></comment>