The Elements of Bureaucratic Style - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2017/04/12/the-elements-of-bureaucratic-style/ <comment><USER2> The writer of this article put to words something I've noticed constantly about corporate press releases and news articles, but have not been able to articulate with such distinctness. The example further down in the article illustrates this "bureaucratic style" well:

"One Dead in Fremont Officer Involved Shooting"

Officer involved? The wording pretends that the police officer was a prop on the scene or some uninvolved bystander, rather than a real person who did a real thing. Re-write it as, "Police officer shoots and kills someone in Fremont". Much more accurate, but you'd never see a press release like this because it correctly describes the police officer as the starring role rather than as a prop in a situation that just spontaneously happened around him.

Think about this style the next time you read some press release where a company is responding to being accused of bad behavior, you'll see it everywhere: Anything about the company's actions will passive and it will be hard to figure out whether anyone in the company actually did anything: "A situation occurred. Procedures were followed." Conversely, anything about the accuser will be active and impart agency: "She became uncooperative. He yelled and acted threatening." It's a deliberate rhetorical tool, and I'm grateful this article gave it a name and described it so clearly.

<comment><USER3> Actually I'll defend this construction.

Calling it an "officer-involved shooting" (should have a hyphen!) in an initial report restricts the scope to a just-the-facts-as-we-know-them-m'am style. Even from the headline I know: 1> where (Fremont), 2> Fatality, 3> cop was there. Hopefully the first paragraph tells me who shot whom and some macro facts.

But in an early article or "hot take" it's rarely clear if, for example, a cop used excessive force, or poorly pressured someone under stress so they took their own life; if there was legitimate responsibility etc. The passive voice here preserves the "innocent until proven guilty" position.

If the cop is later convicted of murder I would hope that a subsequent news article would be more definite ("officer XXX convicted of murder") or alternatively "Letter: distraught father wanted suicide to be a spectacle"

In fact this is why I am generally uninterested in "news" \-- the amount of actual data in these early articles is usually quite small. If people are still talking about it a week later, perhaps it's worth learning about.

<comment><USER4> I agree that news articles shouldn't speculate on motives and whether or not a shooting was proper in the first few days (with the possible exception of a neutral expert on these issues, such as the excellent copinthehood.com).

Nevertheless, "officer shoots X" is at least as factual and without spin (unless X is "victim" or some kind of loaded word).

OP wasn't about news articles, anyway. In this context, the use of OIS from a precinct press release (i.e., a document not from a neutral observer, but from a representative of one of the involved parties) looks like an attempt to pre- emptively disclaim even the possibility of responsibility, which may or may not exist in any particular case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is also an interesting study of the origins and evolution of corporate- speak: [https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/busines...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/business- speak/361135/)

One of the most active sources of new terms is apparently layoffs. Consulting companies and CEOs try to one-up each other, perhaps unconsciously, who can come up with and then own the coolest new term.

Then it starts spreading. CEOs read the same magazines and blogs and then everyone is using the term. "Hmm, I kinda like how so and so used the term 'circling back' I'll start using it too, it just seems so fresh and cool. Everyone will be impressed". [1]

I always wonder how people end up writing in that style. Do they actually think like that, as in for an hour they switch to thinking in corporate-speak, and later switch back to thinking normally. Or do they think normally and then translate as they type so "fuck that guy blah blah" becomes "we reached out to the developer and told them we'll be letting them go".

Imagine the tragedy of a poor CEO stuck in corporate-speak mode, unable to plainly communicate with family or even order coffee, because nobody understands them or just thinks they are an asshole.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/circling.html](http://paulgraham.com/circling.html)

<comment><USER6> So in other words, it boils down to the usual human "I heard some cool new phrase in my in-group, I'm gonna start using it"?

<comment><USER7> Pretty much. There is always a trend and those trends make you money of you leverage them. It's a way to exploit the need to belong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _use of the passive voice to avoid responsibility_

No, it's use of the passive voice to more accurately communicate the outcome of _a system designed so that_ nobody has responsibility.

Saying that using passive voice is dishonest and evasive is a special case of shooting the messenger.

<comment><USER9> Except for especially insidious cases: [https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu](https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu)

<comment><USER8> I don't see the issue with that.

Shortened headlines are _supposed to_ have words elided (so I'd read it as "[is being] paid"), and newsy stuff tends to be about _now_ which means that "paid" as past tense doesn't make sense and it would say "pays" (like the main headline does) if she was the one paying. The sentence ordering (Melania first, Daily Mail last) is to put the thing people are most interested in at the beginning.

It's not a case of dishonesty, it's a case of forgetting that most people don't usually use words that way.

<comment><USER10> I think it's an ugly example of bad headlining, though not 'fake news'. I _did_ parse it backwards at first because so much had been elided.

BBC does this constantly because their mobile news app uses such short headlines - they elide all the specifiers and half the verbs, to the point where what's left is word salad with a handful of key nouns. Annoyingly often, it's necessary to read a piece just to see what the headline meant in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you're interested in this topic, two other books on the same subject from very different angles:

Life at the Bottom by Theodore Dalrymple [https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1566635055](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1566635055)

Eichman in Jerusalam by Hannah Arendt [https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0143039881/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0143039881/)

</comment><comment><USER12> > The success of politicians like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump come from > their ability to reject the party line in favor of surprising constructions > of speech, even as these creations drink from the same poisoned well of dull > thought.

Many have their theories to explain the current reincarnation of nationalism, few are prepared to admit they don't know why.

Right now I think such explanations are unhelpful. In their haste to pretend to understand, I think many prevent themselves from reaching any kind of usable explanation at all. And the application of their pet world view is more a shield protecting them from new evidence than a useful tool to help them understand.

Maybe people would often be better off, just saying, I don't know, and keeping an open mind.

Aside from that, I like how this article throws some light on how language encodes power and systems.

If people can be aware of how that works, maybe they won't be so bound by a discussion that was framed deliberately to disempower them, to prevent criticism of itself, and to confine their possible responses, and even imagination of responses to those least effective.

I just don't think anything good can come from systematically disempowering people. The human spirit always pushes back. Oppression simply guarantees reaction and conflict. And ends up destroying whatever order that the oppression was meant to create.

Instead of crushing people into the shape you think is most desirable, I think things work better when you can inspire them and guide them to take on that shape, and discover the possibilities of that shape, themselves. Not tyranny, not anarchy, but some kind of enlightened leadership. I think the American Dream was a good attempt at this, but maybe it got depleted by over- emphasizing consumerism, and got knocked off balance by, possibly, spurious, conflicts that eroded its moral legitimacy, and resulted in the corrosive self-doubt that stagnated progress and undermined the Dream's appeal.

To reach for a theory, maybe this reincarnation of nationalism is about trying, somehow, to design a new Dream.

<comment><USER13> I find myself dissapointed your comment was short. Great read.

<this reincarnation of nationalism is about trying, somehow, to design a new Dream

American dream was defined by the media, to me. Nationalism was defined by my mother telling what it was like in 1941. I could not believe that men and women would actually sign up for war, as they did then. Everybidy did, she said.

From my ears of viEtnam and tent-cities and matches the last thing that was was nationalism.

So if this new theory of AD is elusive too, then perhaps nationalism-as-dream will be realized by a portion of the citizenship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Let's tease this situation apart."

United Airlines' core concern is for the safety and security of our passengers. Mr. Dao, a passenger on a recent flight was politely asked to leave the flight after a safety-critical United employee had to board and take his place.

The safety and security of all our passengers is paramount at United. After repeated attempts to disembark, Mr. Dao became belligerent and eventually posed a safety risk for passengers and crew members, requiring the contact of the Aviation Police.

The police arrived and handled the situation according to C.R.C 1875.12. At least two non-physical attempts were made to diffuse the situation before a physical response was required. Acting in accordance with the law, officers used a reasonable and warranted amount of force to remove Mr. Dao from his seat, eliminating the safety risk he posed to United crew and other passengers, and also to himself.

We thank the officers and United crew for their quick attention to this matter, which likely prevented further safety and security problems from arising.

At United, we are committed to the safety and security of all passengers and crew.

</comment><comment><USER15> 'The thrust of these style guides falls back to a weird kind of masculine virility. The terms themselves—"passive" and "active"—rely heavily on received tropes of gendered norms, and for that reason alone we should be suspicious of them.'

Are gender norms really the root of all evil?

Power will corrupt in both patriarchies and matriarchies.

<comment><USER16> that comment strike me as odd too - the terms "active and passive voice" are due to the passivity or activity of the speaker in the events being described. It has absolutely nothing to do with gender. If they were called "masculine and feminine voice" to correspond to the same then the author would have a case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the author misquoted United's email; I was kind of baffled by this first statement:

>As you will read, the situation was unfortunately compounded when one of the passengers was politely asked to deplane refused and it became necessary to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help.

The email actually read, "one of the passengers -we- politely asked..."

But that's kind of the problem, isn't it? That the style indignantly defends itself as polite when it's really a big, "fuck you?"

</comment><comment><USER18> One thing the author didn't mention is, in this case, whatever the intentions behind Munoz's dismal bit of bureaucratese, it most certainly did not deflect blame or attention. In fact, the response was so ham-fistedly out of touch with the response that was needed it made the PR situation way worse.

What's the point of PR-speak if it inflames a situation it's meant to cool?

<comment><USER19> > Contains no passive voice.

Passenger is used as the subject, rather than object in your quoted passage. To see it in active voice, change "one of the passengers was politely asked...", to "SOME_SUBJECT politely asked one of the passengers...".

I've oversimplified, since it could be argued as active by adding the word "who",

"one of the passengers who was politely asked to deplane refused..."

but even if that's the case, then the master dodge phrase "it became necessary" cut SOME_SUBJECT from the second part. Note that the passenger is not doing the contacting in

"...and it became necessary to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help."

</comment></comment><comment> crooked-v [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word)

</comment><comment><USER20> This type of nonsense isn't necessarily evil on its face. It's a theatric response to the lazy and hysterical approach that the press and other spectators take with any event.

Communications like this are signals to professionals who speak the jargon. If you know wtf you are talking about, it's pretty easy to parse the nonsense and figure out what is actually going on.

If you're in the know about a topic that others aren't, it's easily to spot these things by looking at the editorial decisions. If there's a new smartphone, and in the 2 hour keynote address, there's no mention of battery life improvements... guess what? The battery sucks.</comment>


Ask HN: Who powers the web? - <AUTHOR> With the Cloudflare and Amazon incidents over the past week and the huge impact they had on the web, it seems clear that a handful of service providers essentially control or power the internet as we know it.
I am curious if anyone has some stats as to what percentage of the web is behind Cloudflare or powered by AWS, etc. <comment><USER2> It's worth mulling through Builtwith's site for information like this: [https://trends.builtwith.com](https://trends.builtwith.com)

For example, here's a breakdown of CDNs:

[https://trends.builtwith.com/cdns](https://trends.builtwith.com/cdns)</comment>


Like Peter Thiel, Tech Workers Feel Alienated by Silicon Valley 'Echo Chamber' - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/like-peter-thiel-others-feel-alienated-by-silicon-valley-groupthink-1518962400 <comment><USER2> I don't get it. I grew up in Silicon Valley and I work in tech, and so do many other people I know. They run the gamut from far-left socialists to libertarians to own a bunch of guns. They have all kinds of ethnic backgrounds and religious views.

Some of my most libertarian/pro-gun friends have not been shy about their political views and it hasn't hurt their tech careers at all. They are far more welcome here than liberals are in other parts of the country.

It seems to me, from personal experience, that the people who feel alienated are the ones who bring politics to work in an overbearing contrarian way, seeking to cause offense under the guise of "debate," and then pretend to be shocked when people don't want to put up with their shit. Work is for working; it's not a debating society, and especially not when the debating is done in bad faith.

Peter Thiel has been more politically vocal than most, and he is vocal about things he knows to be unpopular. He can't be surprised that people who disagree with him are also vocal. If he can't take the heat he should stay out of the kitchen.

<comment><USER3> I work in the Bay Area and I have personally worked with (as in, on the same team with and working directly in cooperation. CEOs, founders, etc. are not included in this count), exactly one person who discussed their conservative views. This is in comparison to hundreds of liberals. Sure, you may be able to identify at least one person on variety of ends of the political spectrum, but I don't think anyone can sanely deny a vast under representation of conservatives in Silicon Valley. Granted, Silicon Valley itself is politically imbalanced. But even in San Francisco 9% [1] of voters voted Republican in 2016.Despite that, I haven't witnessed anything close to that share of conservatives in my tech jobs - even in my jobs lower in the Peninsula and in South Bay.

Adding this as an edit: Also, do you work in the Bay Area currently (you mentioned you grew up there)? There is a pretty substantial discrepancy between voicing political views in high school and college vs. when people actually start working. I have met more than an order of magnitude more conservatives and non-liberals in 4 years of university in the Bay Area as compared working in tech there - 25 to 30 in unviersity vs. exactly 1 in industry. Also edited in the fact that I work in the Bay Area in the first sentence, so I realized I didn't mention it until the last.

<comment><USER4> When the topic of underrepresented groups comes up regarding women and minorities, the reason given a lot is that "they're not interested" or something along those lines. Why would that not be the same reason here?

<comment><USER3> Is it? I've never witnessed a Bay Area tech company state that their under representation of women and minorities is due to a different distribution of preferences in these groups as compared to men and whites & Asians. On the contrary, in some tech companies doing this appears to be a fireable offense.

Also, the point is not that less conservatives are in tech companies is the issue. I am under no illusion that probably no more than 10-15% of SV tech workers are going to be conservative. This is well within my personal estimate judging from people I met in university (during which they were more open about their political leanings) who went on to go into tech. It's that the conservatives that are (and even centrists and less-extreme liberals) feel the need to put on a facade while at work and that the political environment has become isolated to the extent that even mainstream conservative and even centrist views are considered abjectly racist or wrong.

I'd consider an office with 5% conservatives where those conservatives feel empowered to share their opinion to be a better working environment, as compared to an office with 25% conservatives where all those conservatives put on a facade of liberalism out of fear of repercussion.

<comment><USER4> I don't hear the tech companies saying it, but go into the comment section here on any story related to those things, and it will definitely come up as a very popular opinion.

And not too long ago, hell, even currently in some places, it was considered a mainstream conservative view that gays should not have the same rights to marry. If a person holding that view were to work at, say, Grindr, I would absolutely expect them to receive push back on it.

<comment><USER3> This isn't contradicting anything I claimed. If anything, it's reinforcing it. Pointing out the disparity between the prevalence of conservative views (or at least, views that go against the majority in big Bay Area tech companies) on HN vs. in real life reinforces the notion that many tech workers are having to censor themselves and lie to their co-workers to fit in at work.

Marc Andressen said something similar in an interview, I'm going to dig it up and post it here as an edit. Here it is, the relevant bits are around 28 minutes: [https://a16z.com/2017/05/15/andreessen-primack-dc-tech- polic...](https://a16z.com/2017/05/15/andreessen-primack-dc-tech-policy- summit-2017/)

<comment><USER4> My point is, if your political stance is that certain groups should be denied fundamental rights, for instance, then yes, you will feel awkward around those people, and with good reason.

<comment><USER3> And who gets to decide what is and isn't a fundamental right? Remember, the majority of Californian voters voted to ban same sex marriage in 2008. That would make us (people who think same sex marriage should be a right) the minority. If your boss declared the right to firearms a fundamental right, should it empower him or her to fire anyone who donates to politicians that support gun control (in other words, almost all Democrats)?

<comment><USER5> The Declaration of Independence. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm 37 and, God, people treat me like I'm a dinosaur. I've been programming C for 25 years and it's hard to relate to young people who don't know what a machine register is. We can argue about it, I can get downvoted, whatever.

I moved out of the Bay Area after 5 years, and to be honest, the divide between where I am and where the ideological center of Silicon Valley has drifted just continues to get wider.

It has little to do with politics, and it has more to do with the role of technology in human life and the future.

Silicon Valley is overrun by techno-utopians.

I used to be into that, believing that software was this wonderful force that is going to turn man from the ape he is into some kind of artificially- intelligent hyper-being. It's a fail, it's a fantasy. It's just not going to happen, and it's time to wake up from the dream. We're not going to be living on Mars or visit Jupiter or become immortal, not in the next 10 years or in the lifetime of anyone reading this. With high probability you're going to live out your life and die somewhere between 70 and 100. Just like the billions of humans before you. Get used to it! It's OK, even.

I moved away to get out of the shouting match, to get away from so many young bright software developers like me straight out of college, who just want to disrupt everything for no reason, and to get out of that echo chamber. Everyone's a unicorn. Everyone's gonna change the world. FFS your stupid chat apps are not going to change the world.

Moving out of the Bay Area is not about being disillusioned, it's about focusing on things that actually matter, instead of the silly bubble.

<comment><USER7> >> Silicon Valley is overrun by techno-utopians.

That's what it sounds like to me too. I find it particularly hard to reconcile claims of liberalism, or even libertarianism, with an industry led by Google, Amazon and Facebook, companies that basically make money by running roughshod over their users' privacy.

<comment><USER8> As a geographical outsider, it seems to me that this is more indicative that Silicon Valley runs on a deep amoral cynicism that uses hypocritical marketing messages to appeal to a segment of left-leaning youthful technological tastemakers.

I feel this is more of an indictment of the cynicism and hypocrisy of the gargantuan power players in SV than of the alleged political beliefs (techno- utopianism, liberalism) being discussed. The line of discussion that this thread represents, which seems common on HN these days, seems to disparage liberalism as if it is to blame for being used as cover by powerful corporations that seem to me to be more anarcho-capitalist than anything else.

Are there really very many techno-utopians in SV, or are they mostly people and companies who use the language of making the world a better place as a cover for consuming it economically?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is crazy about the the situation in SF is that even 5 or so years ago if you asked me what the "echo chamber" there was echoing I would have said libertarianism and some kind of techno-utopianism. The takeover by the proscriptive far-left has been astonishingly rapid, and it is absolutely real. I also know people who have left, and many more who absolutely keep their political and even philosophical views to themselves, especially after Damore.

It's been an extraordinarily fast takeover and I'd really like to know exactly what happened those 5 or so years ago to precipitate this seismic shift.

<comment><USER10> I have no idea what SF is like, so in these discussions I never can tell if there really is an influx of insane, insufferable far left crazies, or if people who insist on remaining racist and keeping gays in the closet are mad that nobody is having that anymore. The latter is what I see in my own circle of humans but I live in Texas.

I can say though that I've moved further to the left as I've gotten older, from a libertarian tech-stereotype when I was younger, and in large part it has been from seeing the conservative half of american slide slowly further into insanity and horribleness, seemingly driven by fox news, at least among family.

<comment><USER9> > insane, insufferable far left crazies

Definitely this option.

And by the way, I've been increasingly wondering lately whether our blind insistence on labelling absolutely everything "left/right" or "red/blue" isn't doing our society real damage. I've never voted conservative my entire life but I have _nothing_ in common with the far left and indeed fear them a lot more than the far right. We need a new vocabulary.

<comment><USER11> Yes but there are no far left parties in the USA to vote for.

<comment><USER12> As non-american, living outside of america (but having lived there for a year and a half starting January 2000), I concur. I still follow american politics quite a bit (too much for me to remain healthy actually) and I'm constantly bamboozled trying to comprehend what people mean by the "far left".

To me it seems like any one is considered "far left" if they believe in:

\- treating all people, regardless of race, gender, gender-identity or age equally (*) \- believing in the science of climate change \- believing that guns are the main reason for mass murders \- believing that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay

Which, for the rest of the world, are pretty centralist positions...

<comment><USER13> I don't think those beliefs are far-left, I believe what makes beliefs far- left is the conclusions that are drawn from them are typically to reduce the freedom of the governed to achieve those objectives:

\- Treat all people equally, and legislate that outcomes are the same for all groups of people

\- Believe in the science of climate change and legislate reductions programs which incentivize offshoring manufacturing (but don't put any constraints on global trade)

\- Mass murders are caused by guns and that outweighs all advantages of civilian gun ownership, and there's no other way to solve the problem, so it should be banned

\- The more you earn, the more tax you should pay, so if your economic output is really high you should hide your money in other countries and signal your virtue on other fronts so people forgive you for being a tax cheat

<comment><USER14> "Far-left" used to mean "Revolutionary Marxist" \- and still does in most parts of the world. You're talking about left-liberal here by my understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > they feel people there are resistant to different social values and > political ideologies

This is just bizarre to to me. I moved here from the Midwest, which I found stifling. There's a far greater variety of social values and political ideologies (not to mention backgrounds and interests) here than pretty much any place I've lived. The main hostility I see is to intolerance, but that's hardly surprising given SF's long, welcoming history and the paradox of tolerance. [1]

If I were to worry about any sort of uniformity, it wouldn't be political, but in startup culture. 20 years of success has created some very well-greased rails into which most innovation has to fit: bright young founders, seed round followed quickly by A and B rounds. That can be fine as far as it goes, but it has become so orthodox that I think we're not a great place for doing anything other than a plausible Next Big Thing.

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

<comment><USER16> > This is just bizarre to to me. I moved here from the Midwest, which I found > stifling. There's a far greater variety of social values and political > ideologies

Really? Because the only values I've heard expressed have been standard democratic talking points and once in a while far left ideologies.

<comment><USER17> Precisely! Not what OP's political views are but I would guess if he found the Midwest "stifling" and SF "a breath of fresh air", it's because he's aligned with the politics in SF.

Having also lived in the mid-West and SF, I would agree the mid-West leans more conservative, but in any decent sized city you'll find both view points (election resulted confirm it).

I would say SF is just the opposite of a hardcore conservative town. There is almost no consideration for having a different viewpoint. And if you happen to express one, you're certainly made to feel their is something wrong with you.

<comment><USER18> (Not American and don't live in either place you describe.)

Is that feeling of pushback to an (assumed) different viewpoint just that in the midwest, a conservative is in the majority, and in SF they're not? So, in one place you'd encounter almost no confident opposition, and in the other you would? I assume it might stand out and feel like suppression if you weren't at all used to it.

<comment><USER15> I suspect that's part of it for sure. A lot of what conservatives have been getting upset about over the last few decades is diffusion of power away from well-off, white, straight men to everybody else. Loss of power still feels like a personal loss, even if systemically it's a move toward a more equal structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As someone who is an outsider looking in on this whole situation (someone who both does not live in Silicon Valley and does not live in America), I honestly think the whole place and everyone there is f __king insane.

Both sides are seemingly entirely incapable of accepting that people, with all their complexities can have differing view points and not just assuming they are the devil incarnate.

I used to think that I was pretty far-left leaning, but recently, with the attitudes of the so-called progressives, I honestly want nothing to do with these people. How is it that more people aren't terrified that the left has turned themselves into an echo-chamber so against even slightly differing ideals that those who do even slightly go against the norm will have a social- media storm come down upon them to ruin their career and life.

And don't think conservatives are any better. Here is a hot tip for all the conservatives out there - white supremacy and neo-nazi's are not the types of people you want to associate yourselves with. The fact that it's been over 70 years since the end of WW2 and you haven't quite figured that out yet is almost as baffling as the idea that conservatives cannot accept that gun- control does not mean people want to take your guns away, but simply want to make sure that people who would abuse guns can not get them.

Honestly, if the lot of you could start acting like mature adults who can have a reasonable discussion of actual issues without resorting to calling each other names and organizing mobs, the rest of the world that still follow America's example would be thankful.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if you read as much online news about your country of residence as you do about SV, would you think they're fking insane too? Remember that the news distorts, there are trolls all over the internet intent on (and some paid to) stoke outrage and division, and controversy sells. And SV punches way above its weight in newspaper coverage.

I don't like in the valley but I suspect that you and many others are being drawn into an image of the place and of politics in general that is very distorted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a linguistic sleight of hand at work here: 'libertarian' and 'left' is not what is happening in SV. These terms have been hijacked by the identity politics cartel.

The SV political and ideological climate is all about pidgeonholing you into 0.01-0.3% segment ('left-handed bisexual javascript expert'), then maintaining these segments and manipulating the fractured society into neoliberal directions.

It is obvious that there is nothing that can be named as a common interest in SV: there is no such discourse. The commonality is restricted to your 0.01-0.3% segment.

<comment><USER21> That's not quite correct. There are very obvious, very large common intellectual & political interests in Silicon Valley:

Equal representation of women and minorities in tech. Wage gap as a result of discrimination. Unlimited low skill immigration; immigration amnesty. Environmentalism, global climate change. Gay rights. Drug legalization, ending policies of mass incarceration.

Those topics all have overwhelming support in SV.

<comment><USER20> These topics all have overwhelming support in local media, PR and marketing copy, in other words in the official ideology.

The actual people are not much different than anywhere else in the US. But they quickly learn to provide lip service to the official ideology, especially when seeking employment or acceptance in social media-mediated groups (and there are very few that are not.)

The real problem with computer techies is that they tend to be more sycophantic to the prevailing power than other profesions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lotta comments here about anti-Trump stuff.

Do we really think Trump's candidacy and presidency would've been well received by the west coast in 2012/2013 instead of 2016/2017?

I don't think so. Just about everything he said that's been treated as wildly offensive and uninformed the last couple of years would've been no more well- received four years earlier.

Heck, you don't even have to be on the left to believe that _rejecting white nationalism is why California turned blue in the first place_ : [https://www.cato.org/blog/proposition-187-turned- california-...](https://www.cato.org/blog/proposition-187-turned-california- blue)

I think those on the right who don't reject Trump should reflect on how he's changed the Republican party.

</comment><comment><USER23> None of the three people profiled in this article are tech workers. They are investors, or whatever it is that Tim Ferriss is.

To the extent tech workers are leaving Silicon Valley, I'm willing to bet the dominant factor is the cost of housing.

<comment><USER24> This should be the top comment. You can tell from the article that the WSJ is trying really, really hard to push the 'intolerant liberals' angle. From what I can tell, the only person cited who really left due to politics was Thiel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm an immigrant. After 20 years in the Bay Area, I'm calling it quits. There are practical reasons, like the high taxes, high cost of living, and widespread social dysfunction and conflicts. But the biggest problem with the Bay Area isn't a left-right issue, it's that it is filled with techies who went from college to being very well off without the usual decades of struggle, without a lot of life experience, and without much knowledge beyond technology. These people will never grow up, because they have enough wealth and power that nothing will ever force them to grow up. Quite apart from running the Bay Area into the ground, those are simply not the kind of people I want to work with or socialize with.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder how alienated employees of Murdoch owned companies feel in their "echo chamber"

The victim card being played here is quite pathetic. A religous conservative who is told they can't discriminate against gay people claims you need tolerate and respect his intolerance and disrespect because of religious freedom.

Someone who benefitted from privilege, or born into an upper middle class household, claims discrimination if they write a screed on merit against their coworkers and suffer from it because of efforts to reach out and broaden the applicant base.

The "echo chamber" being complained about are broadly shared cultural values we expect Americans to hold, beliefs in All Men Are Created Equal, that really aren't normal subjects of debate. The only issue debatable is the best policies to maintain them.

Many of the complaints don't argue for how to achieve it, rather they take a rather extremist view of meritocracy and hyperindividualism like they just graduated from Ayn Rand University and try to apply it to the very messy real world.

Is it too much to ask to just do your work and if you don't like policies against sexual harassment or racial or queer harassment at your company to go work somewhere that tolerates it?

</comment><comment><USER27> I find the recent uptick in progressivism in SV refreshing, and sorely needed. Then again, I've lived my entire life in liberal enclaves and do not personally identify with conservative / "family values" viewpoints.

<comment><USER28> San Francisco's "progressivism" is undermined by how terribly the city operates. Dirty streets, aging infrastructure, crime, homelessness, laissez faire law enforcement, conservative housing policies, and extreme wealth inequality everywhere. If the progressives can't get their own house in order, good luck selling their vision to the rest of the country.

<comment><USER29> The entire country has awful city planning, SF just happens to be a highly visible example with some unique problems.

Conservatives have plenty of issues as well - look at Kansas or Alabama. Don't see those being discussed at a national level, though the politics that drove them into the ground as now steering the federal government.

<comment><USER30> > _SF just happens to be a highly visible example with some unique problems_

Coming in from New York, San Francisco's lack of attention to its homeless population is self inflicted. It's also a problem that nobody in the city seems very much to care about.

<comment><USER29> I haven't been to San Francisco in 10ish years or NYC in 5 so I can't compare directly, but Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston all have tons of homeless people as well and they seem to get very little attention.

<comment><USER21> The point is that supposedly San Francisco's ideology would be extremely favorable to taking superior care of the homeless vs more conservative cities. The actual results, are that SF does an extraordinarily mediocre job at it.

SF is an affluent city, with a homeless problem consisting of 5,000 people, and they're unwilling to fix it financially. They can afford to, and they refuse to. It's disgusting.

<comment><USER17> That's what gets me. In SF you have a huge liberal majority and is a wealthy city. This is in a state with a liberal majority.

Yet the social problems in SF are probably some of the worst in the US.

It's pretty shocking.

<comment><USER31> Your observation is consistent with the belief that progressive policies are not the answer.

<comment><USER29> If politicians only pay lip service to the ideology when their major supporters are NIMBY property owners, is it really an application of progressive policies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This last election was not normal. (Or it was more normal than we want to admit.) In my first-hand experience, I saw Republicans in the Bay Area spending money and time trying to stop Trump from being elected. These are not Republicans in name only, these are people who serve in the local GOP, people who worked in the George W Bush White House, people who believe in free markets with all their soul, people who want to drastically change the government. They hated Trump.

<comment><USER33> This is what so many people just refuse to see. The GOP did EVERYTHING they could to try and stop Trump. We know Hillary asked the media to cover Trump as a pied-piper she "knew" she could beat. The GOP never wanted Trump, not for one second.

So the irony is that because of people's GOP hate they feel need to hate Trump because he ran as a Republican without actually looking to see what's happening here.

If someone truly hated the Republican Party, they should at least recognize that Trump is their enemy's enemy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It has nothing to do with the content of Silicon Valley beliefs. As far as I can tell, Silicon Valley/Bay Area beliefs are mercurial and change by the month.

It has to do with the moral panic over intelligent people dissenting from The Narrative. This is a new and extremely illiberal phenomenon, and it's probably going to get much worse before it gets better.

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't live in SF and I don't work in tech so I would like to hear what specific conservative opinions people in tech in SF feel like they can't say. Are they economic? international relations? or is it more identity politics based?

</comment><comment><USER36> [http://archive.is/Rb1Jf](http://archive.is/Rb1Jf) works for me.

</comment><comment><USER37> I recently moved (fled) from downtown San Francisco to Nashville TN and couldn't be happier. I lived in SF for over 5 years, and there is absolutely a mass exodus of people and engineers leaving the bay area because of extreme ideology, hypocrisy, constant outrage, and the echo chamber that engulfs everything. Downtown San Francisco is a great place to visit for a few days but no place to start and raise a family.

<comment><USER38> SV is very liberal, yet typically engineers (eg. EE, Mechanical, Civil, Aero, Industrial, Chemical, ...) are conservative. I wonder how many people with real engineering degrees (disclosure my BS is EE with CS minor from top school) are SV liberal.

<comment><USER38> Unable to edit my comment so adding this: [http://www.machinedesign.com/news/politics- engineers](http://www.machinedesign.com/news/politics-engineers)

"Engineers tend to view themselves as much less liberal and slightly more conservative than the general public, according to a recent survey of over 1,200 readers of MACHINE DESIGN and Electronic Design magazines. The same survey also found that engineers say they are more likely to be Republican (42.1%) or Independent (33.7%) voters, as opposed to Democrats (14.5%)."

<comment><USER39> I imagine this correlation could be explained by engineers having a high average salary, and I think high salaries (on average) correlate with being conservative.

I don't have references though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I agree with the premise of this piece. I have lunch with some people that lean right, all of us keep our mouths shut for fear of reprisal whenever politics comes up or a progressive work program is discussed. No one actually cares what we think, no reason to suggest anything at odds with echo chamber.

</comment><comment><USER41> Conservative people always emphasize that equal opportunity is all a society needs, and there is no need to worry about the actual outcome. And now they find themselves in a minority position in one area of the US, and ask for affirmative action for themselves? Funny!

</comment><comment><USER42> Peter Thiel knows what the best city in california is!!

</comment><comment><USER43> I feel alienated by the awful beliefs and behavior of Peter Thiel and his portfolio companies. Now many people can breathe a sigh of relief that someone who wields billions to support Palantir, Trump, and spurious lawsuits will finally leave us alone.

<comment><USER30> > _will finally leave us alone_

He's not even leaving the state. Branding his move as political exodus is marketing for his China-oriented fundraising, a capital source better serviced from Los Angeles than San Francisco.

<comment><USER43> Yeah I was referring to him leaving Silicon Valley / SF as the headline mentions but I agree it's a self serving move and won't really change his agenda much. He did buy citizenship in New Zealand so he can flee there if he messes our country up too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Who ever said that cities are supposed represent all values equally? Move to a different area of the country if you don't like a particular city's political leanings. There are plenty of Republican leaning areas of the country.

</comment><comment><USER45> If Hacker News and Reddit comments roughly approximate SV attitudes, SV would be very right-wing compared to mainstream Europe on the whole.

In any case, this sounds more like other people's distaste is slowly grinding Thiel down and he's just trying to rationalise it to himself with talk of echo chambers and whatnot. You'd think he'd have more sympathy for minorities who have had to put up with that from birth but he does come across as someone who is frustrated when others don't subscribe to his exceptionalist view of himself.

It's not SV, it's Coventry he doesn't like, and he'll be sent there wherever he goes.

</comment><comment><USER46> Intellectually honest 'conservatives' who identify as republicans who aren't actively trying to reform their party and are aligning with the current anti LEGAL immigration, anti gay, white-christian identity politics of the modern GOP shouldn't be shocked that they feel alienated in a place that is largely enlightened on all these things decades ago. Even if you put the social issues asside, the GOP sure loves their deficits and big government. That's been true since the W years. What the hell is conservatism now?

</comment><comment><USER47> "This is probably media hyperbole"

> reads comments ITT

...

</comment><comment><USER48> For anyone caring to get out of the echo chamber and near, unfortunately not onto the beach, join us at engageSPARK in Cebu, Philippines. :) [https://www.engagespark.com/careers](https://www.engagespark.com/careers) Might get a different perspective on the stuff inside this bubble. (Obviously, I'm still interested in the echo, since I'm here.)

</comment><comment><USER49> Sidestep the paywall here: [https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.c...](https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Flike- peter-thiel-others-feel-alienated-by-silicon-valley-groupthink-1518962400)

</comment><comment><USER50> Most silicon valley employees don't really care about any of this. If anything most have extremely conservative opinions, they'll be all for Trump if they could vote on H1

<comment><USER51> Anti-net neutrality, anti-legal pot, draconian immigration policies, erosion of the social safety net, deregulation of the environment, kneecapping solar, climate denial. Are these really things most educated people in silicon valley are on board with? I have no connection to silicon valley, but most tech workers I know wouldn't support Trump at the very least because his climate denial is anti scientific and destructive.

<comment><USER52> The H1Bs I know that support Trump do so mostly because of economic reasons, and because of the immigration policies, like fixing H1B abuse, and making legal immigrants take priority over illegal ones (Democrats are perceived to do the opposite).

<comment><USER53> Can confirm this. Indians in SV are big trump supporters.

<comment><USER54> India with all of its poverty, inequality and bigotism is more or less Trump's ideal country.

<comment><USER55> Wow.

Given that the discussion was about the tendency of Indians to support Trump (at least in SV tech)...

... that's just over-the-top outrageous racist, man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> No, it's mainly just housing and traffic that are SV's main problems right now. It is completely unpassable here. And the area can't seem to fix its problems.

</comment><comment><USER57> Silicon Valley has more college-educated, younger and more diverse work force than average, so it doesn't surprise me that this work force is more liberal.

</comment><comment><USER58> I have seen the far left and far right discriminate in nearly every job I've been in since the mid two thousands. It was worse on the right in the finance industry, but recently someone provided me with a blacklist of right wing individuals in which my name was on it. I found this funny as I am basically a socialist who dedicated a huge portion of my spare time to helping minorities in tech. The world is polarized, just make sure to call it out when you see people being stupid.

</comment><comment><USER59> What is it that Peter Thiel said previously about women voting? What did he do to Gawker?

<comment><USER60> Just a friendly reminder, Gawker did not out Thiel. He had a public profile on Friendster that clearly described him as interested in men. Gawker's editor at the time remarked that people like him thought the web was this super ultra secret bat cave, and that if you posted something there it wasn't really public.

<comment><USER17> You see no difference between someone sharing something on a social platform versus having that information plastered across the nation?

<comment><USER61> Social platforms are largely ways for people to plaster information across the nation. Just look at how Twitter is used these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> # Analyze article posts, sort by hostility and bias # Compare to points from article # begin

</comment><comment><USER63> what would be the reception to someone who just doesn't care about politics, doesn't care about who does what, who likes who, who eats what, who drives what? Libertarian but without the politics, I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER64> Escaping liberal Silicon Valley for super conservative Los Angeles huh? If it were Orange county I might buy it, but moving to Hollywood Hills...come'on.

Seems like a PR stunt.

</comment><comment><USER14> Rather worryingly this got flagged and killed. Hopefully we're still at the point where we can sensibly discuss a WSJ article.

<comment><USER54> Flagged and killed? I just got here through front page. I know you like being a victim, but you are not.

<comment><USER65> This comment breaks the site guideline which asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." At the time the parent was posted, it was flagged off the front page.

Worse, of course, is the personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again.

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

<comment><USER14> Thanks. I was slightly taken aback by that response. Especially because I'm probably not the straw man that the comment was directed at.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I agree with people that say that SV is an echo chamber. I'm software eng., and found it very hard for a year before election to work there. Happy to explain if someone cares to know. It is a bit hard when people on left were told: 'you are smart to vote left' \- they just talk down to me. I'll give you one example, on TV, they had a right wing person getting egged - I'm sure most here saw the news/video. And I had friends I knew for years call me racists. Scary. Etc. After the election - it got worse. So I left SV for NY. I understand if right wing leaves, I know now what it is to be hated. I think you should ashamed - there is no way right wing would treat you that way. (ex: See x-TYT video of Red Pill Black - let me know if you can't find it )

<comment><USER67> You don't think conservatives treat liberals poorly? Go on r/atheism and see all the complaints about living in a red state.

<comment><USER33> Yea... sorry, I don't think a bunch of sheltered evenagelical-atheist kids should really be your go to metric. I can only think of a few worse online communities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I hate to have sympathy for the devil here, but I see their point.

Hackernews is living proof. Pre-election, you could voice a contrary opinion here and have a discussion. Post-election, even the faintest wrongthink shibboleth gets silently downvoted into oblivion.

<comment><USER69> It's the same in Germany. You voice that the many refugees (with often very conservative religious and patriarchal views) pose problems and, päng, you are a nazi.

A balanced discourse is (was) no longer possible. (It's getting a bit better again after some ramnifications became plain to see in some every-day situations).

<comment><USER70> Aren't there prerequisite to a discourse? Like all parties coming together with open minds. Having the intent to seek the truth, not an agenda to win. Using reason and rational thinking over your emotions.

I think lately we're not meeting those qualifications, so maybe it is best not to engage, since discourse would not be productive.

<comment><USER71> Which could be a fine solution, except one or more groups still are making rules which affect the lives of all of the other groups. So disengaging means letting other groups you may disagree with dictate parts of your life.

<comment><USER72> Welcome to civil society. Learn to play ball and compromise since the alternative is from what those refugees are escaping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> To understand what is going on here please read Rand's article "Anatomy of Comprise" in her anthology "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal" and her article "The Establishing of an Establishment" in her anthology "Philosophy: Who Needs It."

Rand wrote; "It is precisely those ends ([sacrifice]-collectivism-statism) that ought to be rejected. But if neither party chooses to do it, the logic of events created by their common basic principles will keep dragging them both further and further to the left. If and when the "conservatives" are kicked out of the game altogether, the same conflict will continue between the "liberals" and the avowed socialists; when the socialists win, the conflict will continue between the socialists and the communists; when the communists win, the ultimate goal of [sacrifice] will be achieved; universal immolation."

In short we are witnessing the end of the Rep party as they are kicked off the social/political stage because they stand for nothing except watered-down ideas/goals of the Dems/Left. Who needs them?

Trump was never a Rep and used the Rep party for a self-aggrandizement, and big FU "Ill show you" to the NY Dems who rebuffed Trump in the '90s when he wanted leadership positions for all the money he was donating.

What Thiel, et. al. don't understand is that they are objecting to the left/liberal Establishment propagated by Academia and based on collectivism/sacrifice as political and moral ideals shared by both parties. The only way to end this process is for Thiel or the Reps to stand up for individualism and selfishness or their protests will be a footnote in history.

<comment><USER73> Should be "Anatomy of Compromise", sorry for the error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Then leave, you can drop a pin on pretty much 95% of America and end up in a conservative place where people will share your values.

Don't like being conservative in the Bay Area because you feel ostracized and judged? Cool, now you know what it feels like to be gay in 95% of America.

Get over it.

<comment><USER75> Doesn't Peter Thiel know what it's like to be gay in 95% of America?

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> well probably lots of vampires find civilized society alienating.

<comment><USER77> Probably moving to greener (redder?) pastures with younger, fresher blood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Off topic: I am legit interested to know how paywall sites get to the front page of HN. I wouldn't have guessed that the WSJ has a team of people to upvote their content to the front page, but now I'm second guessing that assumption. Or, does HN have some hidden allegiance with certain news agencies that lets paywall content through? Obviously TechCrunch gets in free, since it's used for YCombinator startup advertising, but the WSJ surprises me.

<comment><USER79> There's plenty of discusssion elsewhere on HN: you can use search to find references (I'd start out with author:dang paywall). Short short version: they're (e.g., NYT, WSJ, WaPo) big publications with a history of quality journalism that a lot of people are aware of and exposed to. That contributes both to increased submissions and upvotes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Likening people to Thiel is ridiculous. He is personally facing the backlash from openly supporting Trump and being a speaker at his rallies. Nobody else in the valley did anything as absurd or unnecessary. And if he thinks he'll fair better in LA, I think he's sorely mistaken once people start recognizing him en masse. But to my point, this article seems to be generalizing an outlier to make its point. Everyone is being alienated everywhere because the country has a leader who is actively polarizing the populous by demonizing every side that he's not on as an enemy to his agenda, even going so far now as to suggest people who disagree should be labeled as traitors - which coming from the President, is technically a death threat as that is the punishment for treason. Peter Thiel seems to be actively trying to paint a more dystopian portrait of the situation to make himself out to be a victim when in reality people on both sides have been alienated by the dissolution of the "moderate" common ground where we all worked together in favor of a Monday Night Football-esque team based society (or crime drama - good v. bad). More generalizations like this that skew reality aren't going to help anything.

<comment><USER81> "openly supporting" the winning presidential candidate isn't "absurd".

<comment><USER82> Yes it is. When you support Trump, you support his vile brand of leadership. The majority in this the country do not support this man or his ideas. They simply don't. The base that supported him and made this presidency possible is collapsing by all reported metrics (as in they are literally dying off, and younger people neither support Trump's ideas nor are they as religious). So while Trump's base may have squeezed out a win last time, their chances of a repeat decrease significantly as time goes on.

Time is not on their side, and I suspect History is not on their side either.

<comment><USER17> Let me guess, you don't know any Trump supporters?

<comment><USER82> I've lived in the east coast, the west coast, the midwest, and the south all for extended periods in my life. I've lived in so many states in this country that I know intimately the diverse viewpoints and diverse culture that exists across America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> *Right leaning tech workers who have never experienced working outside of their bubble.

News flash: not every place aligns with your political ideology. Try being a liberal in the Midwest or the South.

<comment><USER83> Most big cities even in the south and especially in the Midwest tilt liberal. Most college educated people are also liberal, in tech especially so. Unless you are working in Salt Lake City or somewhere special, you are probably surrounded by liberals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> I'm supposed to feel bad for Peter Thiel? The guy is a billionaire. He can go wherever he wants and do whatever he wants.

He thinks it's hard to be a conservative in California? Try being a liberal in most of the red state parts of the country who actually has to work for a living.

Give me a break.

<comment><USER85> I don't think he wants you to feel bad for him, I think he's just underscoring it's an echo chamber, which is true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> So we should all take a lesson from how people in the Bible belt treat those who are agnostic or atheist, right? <rolls eyes>

If the Valley is such a "liberal echo chamber", why is it that women, homosexual, transsexuals, etc. are the ones still receiving the death threats.

When I see rich, conservative, white men shivering in fear from getting _death threats_ for expressing their religious or political beliefs, I'll worry about your "echo chamber" my precious fragile little snowflakes.

<comment><USER87> Didn't Damore receive threats of physical violence? And he's no Thiel by any stretch of imagination.

<comment><USER86> I don't see anything obvious with a quick Google search, and anybody complaining about that seems to start throwing around words like "antifa" so my skepticism and troll alerts are on maximum.

 _HOWEVER_ , Damore is a _REALLY_ good example of the kind nitwit snowflake that deserves all the approbation he is receiving.

If you are sitting in a corporation and are about to do something that is going to cause political shockwaves, you need to make sure that your position and stance is absolutely rock solid and airtight.

This is true whether you are talking about technology or social behavior. If you're going to political war, you had better have incontrovertible facts and arguments and they had best be overwhelming. You need to run your presentation past a couple of friends and colleagues to solidify it. If you half-ass it, you're going to get your head handed to you on a platter.

Well, guess what? He half-assed it with a bunch of unsupported conjecture and weak arguments that people destroyed almost immediately with real evidence and research and then whined about the fact that people handed him his head.

Which probably _STILL_ would have been okay if he actually admitted to being wrong and put his head back down. But, no, nitwits like him feel that not simply accepting everything he says as correct is terribly, horribly unfair. As such, he _doubled down_ on stuff that everybody already showed was wrong and basically just tried to shout louder.

And then was _shocked_ when he got canned.

The worst part is, there _ARE_ lots of outstanding questions and issues about diversity programs and initiatives. What should that actual goal of such a program be? How do you measure whether it is succeeding? Is success for the company the same as success for the group? Is success for the group the same as success for the individual? What are the downsides of such programs?

<comment><USER87> Evidence in Damore's lawsuit has some rather interesting tidbits about antifa, but while they are not very nice people at all, they are not really relevant to this discussion, I think. It also has evidence of physicasl threats. Those made it to the recently dropped/dismissed NLRB complaint, and it seems (was mentioned in a thread on HM, for sure) that peple involved had received very stern slaps on their wrists.

Now, Damore may not be a very nice person himself (he did go to work for Google of his own free will, after all), but he did a) what Google asked him to do -- provided feedback on some corporate training that he was forced to attend. He backed it with some arguments that while not necessarily water- tight and incontroversible, were stronger than any debunkings of his memo that I have seen, which mostly amounted to calling it "pathetic bleatings" and claiming that it is wrong because it could not possibly be right.

Saying "you are a terrible person and I will hound you until one of us gets fired" or somesuch is not quite "handing him his head". If anything, it conmfirms that Damore is probably more right than his detractors. So while it certainly might have made sense for him to shut up, make a Cultural Revoluition style confession and keep his job. But faulting him for being fireed over a memo that he didn't leak and that is, if anything, far more reasonable than many an action that seems to be accepted at Google (viz. the story of Corey Altheide).

I just don't see how _he_ is a big snowflake here.

<comment><USER86> > It also has evidence of physicasl threats. Those made it to the recently > dropped/dismissed NLRB complaint, and it seems (was mentioned in a thread on > HM, for sure) that peple involved had received very stern slaps on their > wrists.

Please do put a link if you can find it easily. Wading through the history on HN is non-trivial. I will certainly accept legally filed complaints as evidence.

And, they damn sure should have gotten more than slaps on the wrist for threats of physical violence.

> he did a) what Google asked him to do -- provided feedback

And even if I were doing this on a _technical_ issue, I'm going to make sure my arguments are solid before I send it into the ether if the issue is going to cause political grief. That's just common sense.

> stronger than any debunkings of his memo

This one from the Economist is a good general start (I chose the Economist because it doesn't really fall in the "liberal rag" category that most people would place things like Salon, Wired, etc.) [https://www.economist.com/news/international/21726276-last-w...](https://www.economist.com/news/international/21726276-last- week-newspaper-said-alphabets-boss-should-write-detailed-ringing-rebuttal)

There are lots of other problems with his memo that the whole "social science" field that he is quoting has come under strong dispute in the last decade or so.

The most significant point is that Damore ignores any evidence that doesn't support his point. If you're going to be controversial, you have to explain the stuff that _doesn 't_ agree with you as well.

> But faulting him for being fired over a memo that he didn't leak

I thought he explicitly posted it to internal Google circulation. I really hate how it moved to the press (people who did _THAT_ should be fired as well), but I do not believe that he simply gave a confidential memo to HR and then it got leaked. Please do correct me if I am wrong.

Should Damore have lost his job? In my opinion, no.

However, only an idiot goes looking for bear without a really big gun and being surprised when he gets mauled.

<comment><USER87> There is some discussion here. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16396554](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16396554)

You won't actually find an argument from me that Damore didn't behave stupidly, assuming he wanted to keep his job. However, whatever debunkings might there be to Damore's memo, neither Google, nor rags like Verge, nor even Economist provided any. Economist went as low as referencing Zunger's "pathetic bleatings" that make Damore's memo look like a Nobel material. And "social science"s wounds are mostly self-inflicted -- those few arguments that were presented against The Memo came mostly from departments of "womyn's studies" where results are determined long before research starts. Just look at what happens to Peterson (his scientific bona fides seem to be beyond reproach) when he tries to speak.

Google's internal discussion groups are quite weird, but apparently inciting street violence is perfectly fine. I think it would have been reasonable for Damore to expect that a memo that at least pretends to be objective, and does not call for any illegal activity would be acceptable as well.

Shold Google have a right to fire anyone over anything? I believe so. But if they fire Damore for reasons they give, which really are complete bunk, and do not fire the "I'll punch you in the face" crowd, they are hypocrites, and might get mauled themselves in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Everyone here knows SV company environments are hostile working environments for conservatives. Even multi-billion dollar companies espouse far left populous views. You learn to keep your opinions to yourself especially when the office discussion reaches ridiculous levels. Since my views are conservative/libertarian, I won't bother replying to LinkedIn invites from Google/Levi's/The Gap/Facebook or other far left companies. Particularly companies whos' marketing departments are extensions of San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley extremists.

</comment><comment><USER88> The thing is, if you like private property and private contract, this is what can happen to you. If you think any company is within its rights to police speech, then you agree that it's fine for Google to exclude conservative or libertarian speech.

Nobody owes you space for your views. Your place, your rules. Their place, their rules. That's the deal.

<comment><USER89> I think you're drawing a false binary choice here. There is such a thing as "thick libertarianism", for instance. There's nothing inconsistent with the view that sure one is within one's _rights_ to do such a thing but that it is still _bad_ , and that one might, to the extent that one can within one's own rights, take measures to discourage such a thing rather than just accepting it as "Well it's within their rights so it must be OK".

Edit: Or, to put it another way, if one wants to take the philosophy of enforcing norms primarily through private action, let us not forget that that applies not just to the company that owns the building, but also to everyone that company might deal with! And complaining doesn't seem like a bad start.

<comment><USER88> > _There 's nothing inconsistent with the view that sure one is within one's > rights to do such a thing but that it is still bad, and that one might, to > the extent that one can within one's own rights, take measures to discourage > such a thing rather than just accepting it as "Well it's within their rights > so it must be OK"._

Sure, but ultimately, if the other party to the discussion refuses to agree, you need a decision rule.

If your views are largely _about that decision rule_ then you look silly for not accepting it.</comment></comment></comment>


Business Plan Templates/Advice - <AUTHOR>

I have been working on a website that I believe has a very strong potential to take off and be very successful.
I feel it is time to write a business plan, whether I choose to search for VC funding or continue to seed this venture.
Unfortunately, I have absolutely 0-experience in writing a document of this nature. Are there any templates, guides, or how-to sites available that can assist me in getting a basic business plan completed?
What advice do you have for a venture that could virtually 100% seed funded? I have the programming and design aspects taken care of, it's the hardware and scalability, if this does gain popularity upon launch, that I am worried about (I simply don't have the funds to cover anything beyond shared hosting). <comment><USER2> David Rusenko said in a blog post that if you're scaling too fast to afford your hosting fees, ping him, and he'll hook you up (with investors).

In other words, don't worry about paying the bandwidth bill. Just turn the site on and see what happens. Shared hosting can also get you surprisingly far, MediaTemple offers 1 TB of transfer for $17/month. They kind of suck other than the massive amount of bandwidth offered. And it'll be much more expensive if you need a VPS for lower level functions.

Before you write the business plan, I'd fill out a Y Combinator application, whether you plan on applying or not. It asks really good questions, some of which you may have not already asked yourself. From there, if you want to write a business plan, go for it.

A business plan take whatever format you want to. There are certain things that will always need to be there, but the order varies a whole lot. You can find a bunch of different templates if you just google for business plan template, pick one you like. Don't write the whole thing at once, start with a two page executive summary and then slowly expand it.

Also, I have some decent business plan resources, including PaloAlto's business plan software and some .pdfs. Email me and I'd be happy to share.</comment>


Oops, I think I scanned a malware - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.07751 <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/watch-hackers- use...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/watch-hackers-use-a-drone- mounted-laser-to-control-malware-through-a-scanner)

RTLDR: Security researchers send instructions to air-gapped system by shining light on a scanner from laser from 900 meters, from drone mounted laser and from smart light-bulb.</comment>


Uncovering British spies' web of sockpuppet social media personas [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9YhFiZnHkE <comment><USER2> link should be [https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9233-uncovering_british_spies_we...](https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9233-uncovering_british_spies_web_of_sockpuppet_social_media_personas)

This one contains french and german audio as well, with the addition of not being hosted on youtube.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did camera on this one. (All run by volunteers as every year).

Everyone, if you ever speak at CCC, _please_ try to stand still. It's nigh impossible to do this picture-in-picture layout if you don't.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for your efforts!

While I understand the problem of tracking, it has to be said that people who move around the stage usually have a more more engaging stage presence. In contrast, people who stand rigidly at the lectern are often boring. ing, it has to be said that people who move around the stage usually have a more more engaging stage presence. In contrast, people who stand rigidly at the lectern are often boring.

Sounds like a task for OpenCV face tracking :-)

<comment><USER5> Meta, but you might have copy pasted your reply twice.. after 'boring.' the part starts again with 'ing' of 'tracking'

<comment><USER4> The HN user interface on mobile leaves something to be desired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Are hackers the last bastion between us little people and the totalitarian state envisioned by the British people?

Because it seems that we've got a lot of work to do. How people are okay with their taxes paying for things like JTRIG is really dis-heartening ..

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty interesting, good investigation.

The whole thing seems remarkably amateur and low effort. Their slide of limitations is revealing - lack of language skills, no real process for handoffs over vacation times, use of a dedicated URL shortener that only GCHQ use instead of the many commercially available ones - these seem like basic errors. I find it hard to believe that this was a well funded effort or even achieved much at all.

It also casts some new light on the "Russian bots are taking over" establishment meltdown. Projection much? Obviously western government figures know their own staff are doing this sort of thing, so they assume that Russia is too and the lack of hard evidence of the type shown in this talk is neither here nor there.

<comment><USER8> Assume? There's tons of info on Russian troll factories, even from insiders who took part in pushing 'Russkiy mir' agenda around.</comment></comment>


The Parable of the Toaster - <AUTHOR> http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheParableOfTheToaster.html?HN

<comment><USER2> And the people wisely had the king beheaded for specifying implementation details instead of just asking for what he wanted and letting the -engineer- design it.</comment>


UserVoice launches Inspector: Rapportive for Customer Service - <AUTHOR> http://www.uservoice.com/blog/entries/inspector/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the love. If you read our previous post on our dev process using Trello it might interest you to know that feature came out of the internal idea inbox. We all quickly fell in love with it and pretty soon almost the whole team was working on some part of this feature. We took it from idea to launch in less than 6 weeks. Very proud of the work by our team.

<comment><USER3> Great idea and implementation.

I've just coded up a custom "gadget" for our internal admin panel. No more copying & pasting the email address on the ticket into our internal system.

<comment><USER4> @Jon That's awesome! Shoot me an email, I'd love to hear more about it: evan[at]uservoice[dot]com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Open source it and we will help maintain it.</comment>


507 Mechanical Movements (1868) - <AUTHOR> http://507movements.com/about.html <comment><USER2> Here's a Youtube channel with similar content. [https://www.youtube.com/user/thang010146/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/thang010146/videos)

I found it a while ago while deep in "related" videos, it's one of the few channels I'm subscribed too. As I understand it, he's retired with a doctorate in mechanical engineering, and just likes making little mechanisms in Inventor.

</comment><comment><USER3> "507 Mechanical Movements"

If it wasn't for the 1800s date after this title, I would have thought it to be a proposal for an additional HTTP status code.

I still search the web by curiosity, turns out 507 already exists for WebDAV, and it means "Insufficient storage".

<comment><USER4> Sounds like a great catch-all euphemism for human error. AKA the computer received faulty input from the keyboard/mouse movement.

<comment><USER5> 'Layer 8 error' is a good one for that, based off the OSI 7-layer network model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some discussion here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6230363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6230363)

and relevant here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5660770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5660770)

</comment><comment><USER7> The book itself is available in the Internet Archive:

[https://archive.org/details/fivehundredseven00browiala](https://archive.org/details/fivehundredseven00browiala)

</comment><comment><USER8> This has been here before (not surprisingly) I used it as a way to get better at mechanical CAD, building the movements as models and then trying to animate them. It was quite instructive.

</comment><comment><USER9> These are beautiful. It's a shame that the underlying drawing library is proprietary, though. Many animations are missing, and I'd love to contribute. Number 36 looks like it would have been fun.

<comment><USER10> Yeah it's too bad most of the animations are absent. 5 out of 7 I clicked had no animation.

<comment><USER11> Start with the thumbnail view. If the thumbnail is in color, it has an animation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A fascinating book. I have a paper copy published by Watchmaker Publishing and available on Amazon [1]. The drawings in the book are the original edchings, not re-drawn and coloured as on the web site.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1603863117](http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1603863117)

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be awesome if the original drawings could be reincorporated. I imagine once the animations are made, it would take a little additional work to decompose the original image into components that the animator could use. This way, designer/graphic artists (who don't know how to animate) could contribute to this!

</comment><comment> bro-stick Folks whom like this might also be interested in the Ashley Book of Knots (ABoK).

Since it should be public domain, here's a pdf magnet url:

        magnet:?xt=urn:btih:9777cb900abc65939b7d2cab9cc36c51ecb7a95a&dn=The+Ashley+Book++of+Knots&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969

</comment><comment><USER14> It would be nice to have some toy-set for kids with this.

<comment><USER15> Or some nice svg templates that can be easily laser-cut...

<comment><USER16> And/or stl files for 3D printing...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess I'm not going to be productive today. _stares in fascination_

</comment><comment><USER18> It would be really graet to see this combined with [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfznnKUwywQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfznnKUwywQ)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is fantastic. Reminds me of the better part of a morning I spent at the beginning of the summer at the Boston Science Museum, where, in a dark, neglected corner of the basement, they have a very old display with motorized versions of many of these mechanisms. I think I was the only person there the whole time.

There's a lot of buzz about "learn-to-code" movements, but people are generally just as illiterate about mechanics, electronics, and other basic science. I think we may have covered 5% of these mechanisms in one unit of my HS freshman science class.

We do a terrible job teaching science in the US...

<comment><USER20> I actually don't think that's true.

Sure, our curriculum doesn't cover each of these mechanics. But they do cover the basic properties of levers, pendulums, pulleys, gears, cams, chains/belts, levers, etc. Every single one of these mechanisms is a recombination of those ideas. I would argue that for fields that don't actually require designing or building mechanical objects, an understanding of what the primitives are is enough.

The analogous features in computer science would be things like functions, values, loops, etc, that it's certainly possible to understand without being a good programmer. You can know (at a high level) what sausage is made of, without actually being a sausage-maker.

<comment><USER19> Maybe I just had some substandard science curriculum. We got pretty much the 10000, or 100000 foot view of most topics.

I think the bigger problem is that US education is so overwhelmingly aligned with teaching to what is on the SAT. There are a hundred basic life skills that are scandalously neglected in favor of pushing everybody up to calculus (ignoring a lot of the geometry and trig that is useful to know if you end up working in trades) and finely tuning our abilities to churn out five paragraph SAT essays. Shop and Home-ec classes have been slashed. Everybody should be able to bake a cake, hem a pair of pants, balance a checkbook, change their oil, replace a lawn-mower belt, understand a loan agreement or lease, hang a shelf, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The title reminds me a lot of the Elektor series of electronics books from the 80s - "301 circuits - practical circuits for the home constructor".

Probably mostly familiar to Europeans....

<comment><USER22> Elektor, Omni, and Playboy. The last one was a bit repetitive.

(... repe _tit_ ive? Your Honor, totally unintended.)</comment></comment>


US Senate could take the first step tonight to kill the FCC's privacy rules - <AUTHOR> http://www.recode.net/2017/3/22/15025396/senate-congress-fcc-obama-privacy-rules <comment><USER2> "In October, the Federal Communications Commission — then under former Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler — began mandating that ISPs obtain consumers' permission before turning over their private data to third parties, like advertisers."

This is a flat lie. That rule change has _never taken effect_ and, even if left alone, could not have taken effect any earlier than next October. (IIRC, that's in Section 310.)</comment>


Deep Q Network Learning to Play Pong on TensorBoard - <AUTHOR> https://www.floydlabs.com/tensorboard/fWLV5Ej2xxoQoooRZNXNuK/ <comment><AUTHOR> I built it with PyTorch and is running in FloydHub with GPUs. I suggest you set a smoothing of 0.9 to see the increasing trend :)

Code can be found here: [https://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q- learning](https://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q-learning)

<comment><USER2> The link is timing out when I try to access it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! Sorry for that, FloydHub has got some errors at the moment and my progress wasn't stored anymore.

You can check out the code here: [https://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q- learning](https://github.com/diegoalejogm/deep-q-learning)

It works! I got the models up to the point where FloydHub stopped working. Leave me your mail or something and I can write you to let you know when I upload the training model again! :)</comment></comment></comment>


Cloudflare starting to enable DNSSEC automatically for .dk domains - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/dk-dnssec/ <comment><USER2> Cloudflare has an absolute stellar interface for handling DNS. I have used many paid services as well but they all lag hugely behind Cloudflare in terms of usability. Really good to see them stay on top of their game.

A few of the other big players do have reasonable interfaces but we are currently seeing quite a centralization of services. I hope more players in this field will up their UX/UI game as I much prefer diversity in the market.</comment>


Google off list of 20 most trusted companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/15/BU7F14N56T.DTL <comment><USER2> So people trsut Facebook but not Google.

Opinion like this is all very well but I wonder how much of it is based on what the public pick up from the media. Google have been slated a few times this past year over privacy issues (personally I trust them quite a lot) whilst Facebook haven't caught the media attention much. So it's not a surprising result.

Still I know who I trsut more....</comment>


NASA makes entire media library publicly accessible and copyright free (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://images.nasa.gov/ <comment><USER2> If I had the appropriate skill, I would map out the "face" on Mars and create a 3D app that lets you look from any arbitrary vantage point, and move the sun around anywhere you want in order to emulate the different times of day, season, etc.

It would be interesting to see from that how the optical illusion works, and also dispel the lingering belief some have carried over that NASA (for whatever reason they ever would do such a thing) blew it up with nukes.

I think such an app would be quite popular for at least 15 minutes. Ample resources are available for it.

<comment><USER3> I think the steamvr environments feature lets you change the time of day by dragging the sun around. There is a nice one someone made from the curiousity rover data that includes a model of the rover itself. [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92814...](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=928142301) Google earth vr has a similar thing. I havent seen one for the moon but it should be possible.</comment></comment>


Over NSA worries, Germany ends government contract with Verizon - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/over-nsa-worries-germany-ends-government-contract-with-verizon/

<comment><USER2> Some German reader commented on another site that the project ("Netze des Bundes") that is presented as to be stopped "because NSA" was in fact a government project that was already in 2013 recognized as a failure (apparently after spending 8-digit sum only for hardware) and that security is just a good distraction, since otherwise it would have to be explained why after so much wasted money the project is about to be closed.</comment>


Study Confirms Climate Models Are Getting Future Warming Projections Right - <AUTHOR> https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2943/study-confirms-climate-models-are-getting-future-warming-projections-right/ <comment><USER2> Preprint: [https://sci- hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085378](https://sci- hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL085378)

Abstract

> Retrospectively comparing future model projections to observations provides > a robust and independent test of model skill. Here we analyse the > performance of climate models published between 1970 and 2007 in projecting > future global mean surface temperature (GMST) changes. Models are compared > to observations based on both the change in GMST over time and the change in > GMST over the change in external forcing. The latter approach accounts for > mismatches in model forcings, a potential source of error in model > projections independent of the accuracy of model physics. We find that > climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in > predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing > warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between > model-projected and observationally-estimated forcings were taken into > account.

"External forcing" means basically CO2 level. They adjust model projections for errors in projecting CO2 increases. So what they're testing is just the physics of the models.

</comment><comment><USER3> Lol, you could have simply projected the warming from 1900-1940 and been in that confidence interval.

The planet is warming, and CO2 is drastically exasperating it, but our data and models are crap. Look how many fights and researcher nerd wars have happened over something which sounds trivial like satellite altitude drift or locating ground stations, and you'll see compromise, number fudge, magical constants, and the typical amount of statistical shenanigans.

We need to do better.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am cheered to see that we are applying the fundamental test of good science to a very political topic.

I would be interested to see how recent climate models differ from the (proven able to predict) models from the 70's. Logically, one could make an argument that we should trust the predictions of the (earlier, simpler) models of the 70's than the more recent ones, which are analogous to new medicines which have not been through a double-blind study yet to prove that they are better than the old standard.

<comment><USER5> How is this topic political?

<comment><USER6> In the US many (most?) prominent members of the Republican Party (our right wing/conservative political party) deny the existence of global warming/climate change.

<comment><USER7> There was a NYtimes article showing that the denialism has been happening in all three english speaking countries: US, England and Australia, because of brainwashing.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/world/australia/fires- mur...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/world/australia/fires-murdoch- disinformation.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytclimate)

Of course, nobody wants to hear they are the useful idiot that fell for it, but we can't let that stop us from pointing out reality.

As far as the Republican party goes, I'm sure there are many who do believe in climate change, however they have to fall in line and so they will not speak up. The Republican party is known for presenting a "unified" message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why was blargmaster33's comment killed within 1 minute of posting? Which guideline does it violate? What rule does it break? Most importantly, if it is a false statement, what proves that it is so?

<comment><USER9> 'blargmaster33's account is dead, likely due to their karma (-18).

<comment><USER10> And we're all surely missing the thoughts of blargmaster featuring such insights as "Pinochet did nothing wrong" and "The only good communist is a dead one" and "God bless the Spanish for expunging this evil from existence" where "this evil" is the Mayan people.</comment></comment></comment>


Want to Raise Your IQ? Neuroscience Says to Take Up This Easy Habit - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/want-to-raise-your-iq-neuroscience-says-to-take-up-this-easy-habit.html?cid=cp01002quartz <comment><USER2> And here I'm the weirdo thinking that music has intrinsic value.

"Practice kissing! It exercises your mouth muscles so that you can eat soup better!"

<comment><USER3> You win the internet today! Too bad you'll be down voted by the type of people who think the value of a college degree is primarily based on its impact on future earnings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> tl;dr Learn to play a musical instrument

<comment><USER5> I think a TL;dr tooltip should be included in every HN title. Saves us a click!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I met a few people who studied music (different instruments or theory) and later switched to a career in programming. They said the whole theory stuff felt a bit like a different approach (notation etc) to math.

</comment><comment><USER7> Click bait.

<comment><USER8> Hey, as long as we're sharing click bait, I have to share one of the funniest spam email titles I've seen in a long time, which happens to be on the topic of IQ: "Harvard Study shows 'Smart Drug' proven to double IQ".

Yes. _Double_. Let us not accuse this spammer of dreaming small!

<comment><USER9> The only mention of IQ in the original article by Lutz Jäncke ("Music drives brain plasticity") is a reference to another study " Glenn Schellenberg [37] uncovered a greater IQ increase in children enrolled in music classes compared with well-matched children who received no musical lessons". However it's hardly news that popular articles exaggerate findings in journals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'Easy'</comment>


To save money, state builds copters from surplus parts - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2025365049_dnrhelicoptersxml.html?

<comment><USER2> The article says they're paying about $500K to refurbish a Huey. Northwest Helicopters sells refurbished Hueys for around $500K, and that includes many new parts, new wiring, and modern avionics. They also have an upgrade version, with a more powerful engine, carbon-fiber blades, and a longer-lived transmission.

<comment><USER3> Yup, I can buy a refurb straight truck for 50k yet a refurb firetruck costs an order of magnitude more.

Yes, they are doing the refurb in-house - but when its done for the same 500k its fully outfitted for the duty it needs to do, versus 500k for one that would still need additional conversion for firefighting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is admirable and pretty cool that they have the staff who came together to relish the challenge and developed the expertise to refurbish the mishmash of parts.

>All told, an aircraft like Caroline takes roughly 5,000 mechanic hours to become flight-worthy.

For a site like HN, the above quote sounds so improbable when applied to software.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps. It's the equivalent of a project that takes a 5-developer team 6 months, full-time, to complete. When you put it that way, it's not so out-of- bounds ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A question to copter engineers: why does a copter have to be ripped apart and reassembled after just 125 flight hours? I don't think that an airplane with far more complex parts needs such short full-maintenance intervals...

<comment><USER7> Which airplanes parts do you think are more complicated than a helicopter swash assembly?

<comment><USER6> I'd guess stuff like the F-35s STOVL system ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls- Royce_LiftSystem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_LiftSystem)) to be a quite complex thing (but apparently the gun of the plane is more complex than this, lol) or the Airbus A380 and bigger planes due to the massive weight of the planes and the corresponding immense power of the engines.

<comment><USER8> The F35 has to spend something like 10 hours in the shop for every hour of flight time.

<comment><USER6> What the ...? Okay, at least that explains why according to wikipedia they plan to buy 1.7k jets... if they need 9 jets as "stand in" for every one that's been flying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Absolutely ridiculous that they have firemen heading off into danger in a 50 year old airframe.

I'm sure the State wastes 10 million a year on any number of things.

<comment><USER10> Why waste good helicopter parts? I would have to think that the materials used in military applications are more robust than commercial. Refurbishing old parts isn't bad so long as it's done safely. The article says that the helicopter parts are inspected visually every 25hrs, a tear down is done every 125hrs, and any anomalous issue gets them grounded. No mention of problems with the refurbished copters.

Honestly, I think this is a very smart and efficient move on the part of the state. Reuse when possible, so long as it doesn't jeopardize safety.

<comment><USER11> There is no such thing as a safe helicopter.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. In fact, the most dangerous aspect of high-angle mountain rescue is usually flying in helicopters in borderline weather conditions, not the actual act of plucking people off of mountainsides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 500k sounds insane I have seen flight worthy helicopters for 300k.

Seams more like they do it cause they like it.

<comment><USER14> Flight worthy firefighting helicopters for 300k? With at least the same number of hours left on all the major parts (engines, airframe, etc)?

Any links?

<comment><USER13> Have not seen anyhing recently, just one of's at various places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this kind of like Orbital Sciences using the surplus rocket engines?

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe order _one_ F35 less and give these guys a bit more budget?

<comment><USER17> How many states have F35's?

<comment><USER18> I believe he is saying that instead of burning up the federal budget buying this mediocre design-by-committee jet, they could allocate more money to the states.

<comment><USER19> Logical thinking will get you booted out of office.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cellular Sprites – Generate 8-bit sprites using Cellular Automata - <AUTHOR> https://cellular-sprites.herokuapp.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone! Here's a fun web-app that I made to generate random sprites using Cellular Automata. For this, I used Seagull ([https://github.com/ljvmiranda921/seagull](https://github.com/ljvmiranda921/seagull)), a Python library for Conway's game of life, and streamlit!

Cellular automatons are interesting creatures, using a discrete mathematical model, you can approximately simulate artificial life. Use this web-app to control reproduction and stasis rates, then observe how your sprites will transform!</comment>


Why not just keep both YC programs in Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR> http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18141 <comment><USER2> We certainly think about it. One reason we keep doing the summers on the East Coast is that the universities are there. The Atlantic Corridor is to founders what the Bay Area is to investors. Another is that I think it's good for our brains. SV is more energetic than Cambridge, but Cambridge is smarter.</comment>