French startups getting ready to demonstrate against plans to tax exits at 60% - <AUTHOR> http://flirtatiouslabs.com/post/32589397397/french-startups-getting-ready-to-demonstrate-against-pla

<comment><USER2> That seems like a ridiculous tax against one of the only growing industries for young people to participate in….

</comment><comment><USER3> at least there is good croissant there...</comment>


New York must pay Uber/Lyft drivers unemployment benefits - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-lyft-drivers-new-york-must-be-paid-unemployment-judge-2020-7 <comment><USER2> Uber's business model is outsourcing externalities. Having to classify contractors as employees undermines their ability to be profitable. If they were focused on profitability over growth, they should pull out of all markets which classify drivers as employees.</comment>


Vivus, bringing your SVGs to life - <AUTHOR> http://maxwellito.github.io/vivus/

<comment><USER2> > They all start and finish at the same time, hence the name `async`.

Since the "async" animation is the only one that is synchronous, it seems a bit misnamed!

<comment><USER3> Yes, surely the "delay" one should be Asynchronous, the "async" one should be Synchronous and "one by one" should be Sequential.

<comment><USER4> async and sync aren't even the correct terms here. Parallel, Serial, and Staggered seem more apropos.

<comment><USER5> Maybe instead of Delayed, Async, OneByOne, have: Staggered, Together, OneByOne

Keep the names friendly and not too technical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, I can't use software that isn't "made with love". Consider revising. You might also consider having your code snippets hosted with ❤.

Kidding of course -- the love that went into this is self-evident.

<comment><USER7> I initially misread the footed as "Make love with a keyboard" :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This technique reminds me (aesthetically) a lot of the drawing of RIP images [1], though that only happened because they took forever to download :)

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

<comment><USER9> Oh _WOW_ , it's been forever since I thought about RIP. Memories of graphics coming across at 2400 baud...

<comment><USER8> Yep! RIP and even animated ANSI opened up some cool animations when it was exploited to make things like simulated motion and stuff like that, the good old days!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The strokeDashOffset trick is a great hack.

I used it to animate a route on a US map. [http://live.watsonswander.com/](http://live.watsonswander.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can see an great example of Vivus in use at Estée Lauder [http://www.esteelauder.com/boutiques/the- classics/index.tmpl](http://www.esteelauder.com/boutiques/the- classics/index.tmpl)

</comment><comment><USER11> love it!

Fellow SVG nut : [https://s3.amazonaws.com/macslow/index.html](https://s3.amazonaws.com/macslow/index.html)

<comment><USER12> They look good. However, clock8.svg is broken in Chrome 40 on OSX 10.10.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Had to do some similar animations recently. Wrote up a super simple function that can be combined with any easing function, and where you're in full control of the animation progress.

It's not specific to SVGs and doesn't do very much on it's own. Thankfully, you can use off-the-shelf easing functions and higher-order functions to have time/frame/whatever-based animation progress (e.g. as an advanced example, i actually utilised the accelerometer as input for animation progress)

Check app.js for example of fading element's opacity and animating an SVG path [https://gist.github.com/WickyNilliams/af30ad9b1557f894efab](https://gist.github.com/WickyNilliams/af30ad9b1557f894efab)

</comment><comment><USER14> This looks great. I like how it normalises the shapes into paths too. But are there any tools to do this for the command line that "simplify" SVGs so your library won't have to worry about this?

<comment><USER15> It seems like it wouldn't be a Herculean task to take pathformer.js and turn it into a standalone CLI utility: [https://github.com/maxwellito/vivus/blob/master/src/pathform...](https://github.com/maxwellito/vivus/blob/master/src/pathformer.js)

<comment><USER15> Quick and dirty, but this does the trick I think: [https://gist.github.com/benshimmin/4bd6bb9cb8733a6acba7](https://gist.github.com/benshimmin/4bd6bb9cb8733a6acba7)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is great, though none of the examples have any fills - just stroked paths.

From what I understand, this would not work with filled paths (or it would only animate a stroke, not the fill), right?

<comment><USER17> It's a hack with path strokes to make it appear as if being drawn, so yes it won't work with fills. Although if you approximate the fill with a zig-zagged stroke you could get a good impression of an animated, drawn fill as well with this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Really nice and easy to use! I have added an example to the Paths.js demo where I show how it can integrate with Vivus to provide animation of the generated paths

[http://andreaferretti.github.io/paths-js-react- demo/](http://andreaferretti.github.io/paths-js-react-demo/)

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks awesome, but as someone who never uses SVGs in practice: what kind of gotcha's should I look out for when using this? I'm thinking incompatible SVGs, performance issues due to abuse, that kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER20> I feel like this has been posted before--I recognize the aperture demos--but I can't find the thread. Any ideas? Did this change names?

</comment><comment><USER21> this could potentially be a really cool alternative to a 'spinner' on initial load of an app.

<comment><USER22> Coursera does something like this IIRC

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I see some strange "dots" floating before the start of the animation, with firefox

<comment><USER24> [https://github.com/maxwellito/vivus#firefox](https://github.com/maxwellito/vivus#firefox) _For Firefox users, you might encounter some glitches depending on your SVG and browser version. On versions before 36, there is a problem to retrieve path length via getTotalLength method._

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this going to be cool if I use it with Rickshaw? Because it seems like it might.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is super cool! Good work!

</comment><comment><USER27> Awesome

</comment><comment><USER28> Oh that's nice.</comment>


Dwolla fined $100,000 for misrepresenting its data-security practices - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/02/dwolla-fined-100000-for-misrepresenting-its-data-security-practices/ <comment><AUTHOR> 1) How did CFPB come to investigate Dwolla? Does it originate it's own audits or was it tipped off?

2) Was the offending behavior just the marketing misrepresentation? Or does the CFPB actually require certain data security standards to be met (regardless of any marketing messages)?

<comment><USER2> Well, I still see it as an accepted method of payment by the Treasury Department. [https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/4624405](https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/4624405)

The Order is interesting. [http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201603_cfpb_consent- order...](http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201603_cfpb_consent-order-dwolla- inc.pdf) (As well as being one of, if not the, smallest monetary orders the CFPB has ever made.) It is not based on Dwolla being breached in any way, or particularly insecure security practices (IMHO). Nor is it based on any particular legal requirement Dwolla has to follow. It's based on Dwolla advertising how secure they are, and the CFPB decided that, in their opinion, they were not that impressive. Hence they felt Dwolla misrepresented itself.

Specifically (on their main complaint), encrypting data at rest (as opposed to encrypting data in transit, as well as tokenizing data, which they do, and is very important) is the least important part of securing data...because the only way that stored data is used is by decrypting it...any anyone who has gets far enough to access that encrypted data at rest, would also be able to access the private security key that is decrypting it at the same time. Encryption for at rest data is more important for backups.

It's also interesting that it appears (maybe) Dwolla got on the CFPB's radar by writing them a letter two years ago, in part discussing how secure they are... [http://blog.dwolla.com/net-neutrality/](http://blog.dwolla.com/net- neutrality/)

And from the "Isn't that Ironic" section... [http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/666000.pdf](http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/666000.pdf) The CFPB failed its own audit by the GAO, for its security practices for personal financial data it holds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the whole thing seems odd to me. And the whole "Labs" story sounded fishy, too. I wonder if when that letter was written that they were already under investigation considering the grievances date back to 2102 and before?

<comment><USER2> Yeah, compare to say, [http://www.cutimes.com/2016/02/26/coast-central-credit- union...](http://www.cutimes.com/2016/02/26/coast-central-credit-union- website-hacked) Most credit unions have really poor technology. And too much of the order is yammering about policies, procedures, and training. Like that is a magical panacea, vs. a good tokenized architecture. I can see sending Dwolla a notice (perhaps as an example to others), but a fine is way overreaching, in my opinion.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Starbucks Style Guide - <AUTHOR>

About that Starbucks Style Guide, it seems that they removed that toggle box that was also showing the grids and some informations. Anyone know if that's a home made plugin? Is there any that could do such things?
I found that screen capture on Internet on what looked the box: http://cdn.impressivewebs.com/2012-04/starbucks-style-guide.jpg
Unfortunately, we can't see the actual grids... <comment><AUTHOR> Finally, I've found that link with another screen capture where you can see how the plugins in action:

<http://decodering.com/post/19688976750/starbucks-style-guide>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My bad. They didn't remove it. It's just broken because of missing jQuery.</comment>


Ask HN: How does one simplify UI design of a complex web form? - <AUTHOR> I am working on a project that requires a web form  with about 40 fields of various types e.g. calendar, dropdown list, radio buttons, text fields, numerical fields, file dialog etc. Unfortunately I am not able to share the exact details of the actual form due to confidentiality. Hence I am seeking general advice on designing complex web forms.
I am looking for some inputs on how to start thinking on managing the complexity of UI design with lots of data entry fields. As I am not a UI designer I am bit overwhelmed by the size of the web form. What approach would a UI designer take when starting the design process of a complex form from both aesthetics and usability point of view?
I was thinking of grouping related fields together and revealing each group in an accordion style of design so that the user is not overwhelmed when entering the data. Is this a sound idea in general or are there better way to present complex web forms? <comment><USER2> The Chinese visa application process does this well, and includes most of the field types you listed. Instead of using tabs, it lists sections on the left, and marks them in a different colour when complete. This pattern is very common for online visa applications, which have many fields that can easily be grouped.

To access the form, scroll to the bottom of this page and click 'AGREE':

[https://bio.visaforchina.org/#/nav/system](https://bio.visaforchina.org/#/nav/system)

</comment><comment><USER3> Let them know all the things they will need upfront (information that needs to be looked up)

Make it save / resumable

Group related items, probably(?) separate into pages / steps, with step x of n at the top (Google multi step / phase forms)

Auto complete / suggest where appropriate (address / info you may know about them already)

[These seem to be in a good priority order imho]

</comment><comment><USER4> You got the idea. Break it down into steps. Design it into 3~ tabs.

like so: [https://imgur.com/a/XaOwZND](https://imgur.com/a/XaOwZND)</comment>


Berlin Builds Ideas to Stage a Housing Revolution - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/02/berlin-germany-housing-rent-how-much-price-landlord-policies/582898/ <comment><USER2> The truth is that rents in Berlin are exceptionally cheap compared to other major cities. Try finding a flat in London or Paris for <10€/square meter/month that is half an hour bike ride away from the city center.

The only way to keep rents this low in the face of rising demand is public housing that is rented out below market rates to low income tenants, or via a lottery.

<comment><USER3> One of the reasons for the cheap rent is the fact that the population of Berlin is still below what it was prior to WWII. I found it quite baffling at least when I read about it.

The city got hit _hard_

<comment><USER4> The population of Manhattan is also below its pre-WWII level, and much below its ~1910 peak, but rent is not cheap.

<comment><USER5> The difference lies on the metropolitan area. The New York area is surely more populated than in WW2, even if Manhattan isn't.

<comment><USER6> Nope. The difference is that you had far more people living in the same dwelling units. The population of Manhattan peaked around 1910, at 2.3M, it is 1.6M today.

<comment><USER7> NYC population, he meant.

Berlin is overall smaller than before WW2. And it shows, the place is really empty and spacious compared to comparably attractive cities.

The issue is that Berlin people like it that way. They don't want high rise buildings, let alone skyscrapers. They want their local "Kiez" culture, where you live, eat, meet and have everything around your house. Berlin doesn't have a CBD, and it doesn't have a real city center. It has many equivalent ones. It's like a huge collection of villages.

Berlin is different from Paris or London, and certainly NYC, most importantly in that it is not cramped. There are numerous huge empty buildings and free areas right around the geographical center. The issue is not space. The issue is buildings.

Building in Berlin is difficult. It needs to be pretty and fit the area, its spaces need to be open to the public or accessible, it needs to provide public infrastructure and provide for kindergartens, doctors offices etc, it can not be too large, it needs to have x% social appartements, and it can not have more than y% luxury flats for sale etc. etc.

Is that good? I don't know. I compare it often to places in developing countries, where you can build up huge areas of high rises indiscriminately, and if you wanna have gated areas for rich people, that's fine. That's why the sidewalks are usually unfinished just outside a given area. Not so in Berlin. Building something is like an expensive privilege.

And hence, there isn't enough space for housing, even if there is certainly enough space to "be".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's horrible. They do everything to prevent more housing from being built.

The fact is, the city is just popular, so people are moving in, which drives the prices up.

The government of Berlin consists of incompetent socialists. Just look at the disaster of the new airport for a popular example. Please don't take any cues from them. They only persist because Berlin get's a lot of subsidies from the rest of the country.

<comment><USER9> The thing is what would happen if they respond yoy he growing demand and build more housing ? If the economy of the city slows down even a little bit it will be hit hard with bad debt. Companies are currently mushrooming in Berlin. Keeping rents affordable could in fact help the people and help create more companies there.

<comment><USER8> I don't think the city should do the building, so I don't understand what you mean by bad debt?

Affordable rents don't help much if you can't find a place to rent.

It is not just a problem for people who want to move to the city, but also for people whose situation has changed, and who now can't move. (Like having kids, switching jobs, that sort of thing).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Everyone and their cat wants to live as close as humanly possible to the hip center of the hip city. But of course, they literally do not want to pay the price. Why is there a vegan bakery specialized in Afghan Bagel[1] around the corner? Because there are enough hip, young professionals to pay for even the most unlikely specialty. Business can afford to cater to the most extraordinary taste, but only because there are so many fluent customers. These customers then simply drive prices.

Due to the limits of public transportation, there are basically three ways out of this situation:

1\. Rent ever-smaller, modernized apartments 2\. Move away from the center 3\. Get out of the city altogether

Modern urbanites will not pick any of these options. They want cheap, large apartments with basically no insulation and 4m high ceilings. They do not want to travel more than 10min with the subway. And the thought of leaving Berlin borders on a crime against humanity. Now add to that the part of the population that lives in the center of the city for decades and literally cannot move anymore and you have a really bad situation at hands.

IMO, it is ironic how the modern urban population that is so quick to assign blame for climate change (to car owners, carnivores), social injustice (to white men, preferably older), or simply a lack of mobile network coverage fails to understand their own contribution to the problems of a modern city.

Sorry, but I needed to vent that.

[1] Exaggeration. I don't even know if there are/were any Jews in Afghanistan, but I like good Bagel.

<comment><USER11> > Due to the limits of public transportation

Fix this.

People live within n time of where they want to be. If people can travel faster then the space within n time can be greater.

This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities.

Have public transport offer high speed and frequent rail routes, and then many local solutions from cycling, walking, buses, trams.

<comment><USER12> > _This is the key to Tokyo and other very large metropolis cities._

But they also live in small apartments and homes. I'm not convinced that Tokyo is a good example here.

The key to this problem is to have jobs in places that aren't large urban centers. This way the population spreads out and housing becomes more affordable.

<comment><USER13> I don't completely agree with your assumption that living in Tokyo means you need to live in a shoebox (and especially not in Osaka which is about 2/3rds the price of Tokyo), but actually I think there's a case for cheap, somewhat- cramped housing with good transit access to the city, for those who want it.

In Japan, a middle class family can own a somewhat cramped (say 900 sqft?) 3bedroom house/apartment walking distance to a world class rail system and generally walking distance to schools and some stores too.

In America's top cities, a middle class family can't afford to own a 3 bedroom apartment with rail access generally, so they move outside the city to the suburbs where they often have to drive to work - which means they need to buy a car, buy gas, etc

But if you don't want the lawn and the picket fence, why is this the only option available? We've taken a one-size-fits-all approach with covering the vast majority of the country with big suburban houses, and the free market is proving people want options, evidenced by wildly inflating prices of urban properties.

<comment><USER14> ...also loans (in the USA) are determined on the size of the house as collateral. You are incentivized to buy a large house and small land. I would rather buy large land and a small house so that I can grow more food, trees, other natural resources. Our family has no need for a large house and they are inefficient to cool and heat.

<comment><USER15> > ...also loans (in the USA) are determined on the size of the house as > collateral.

What are you talking about? The collateral is the full property, not just the structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Everything but freezing rents!

Freezing rents literally destroyed Portuguese city fabric and renting market during that time: landlords didn't want to rent more houses neither repair the rented ones. Until recently wasn't uncommon to have old people renting a flat in Lisbon city center for 20€.

<comment><USER17> I wonder if cities that freeze rents also freeze property taxes?

<comment><USER18> Some do. California froze property taxes state wide. Many cities then instituted price controls on rents. The result is prices over $10 per square foot in cities like San Francisco.

Rent control means that renters have a big incentive not to move to different apartments. I've even heard stories of people continuing to rent their places after they've moved to different cities so that they can keep the same rents if they ever move back to San Francisco.

Freezes on property taxes means that homeowners try to hold onto their home as long as possible. Because many home owners invest a big portion of their net worth into their house, they are often very adverse to anything that might make home values go down (like building more housing).

Frozen rents + frozen property taxes = extremely high rents due to little supply of housing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I live in a different but still expensive Germany city and rent a apartment from a city-owned public housing company. The rent of the landlord's apartments is 20-30% lower than what you would pay in the free market, and in my neighbourhood I can get a pretty good idea of what people do to get one of those highly desired apartments. It's just crazy. I have heard everything short of bribing the person responsible for selecting renters. Calling her daily, flowers, pity stories.. another way to get into a highly coveted apartment is to get a recommendation from a renter who's leaving, basically taking over their contract. Often that involves paying absurdly high sums to the previous renter for floors and furniture left behind, or doing renovations for them.

By the way, getting into the best kindergartens and schools appears to work like that as well. Many German cities are so overcrowded that you need to network like in socialism to get what you want, as there are things that money can't buy (or at least only a lot more money can buy). Those who are not well connected have a hard time to get the city's services, or at least will end up with worse facilities.

The demand is just higher than the supply, and if the demand can not be controlled by increasing the price, people will find other ways to fight for what they want...

<comment><USER20> Yeah, apartments is one part of it all. I'm trying to find a place in a kindergarten and it's hell. In Berlin kindergartens are free for some time and there are no free places. My wife today tried to find a place in a private kindergarten, no luck even in one for 800 EUR/month.

If we knew German language and customs better maybe it would be easier. But then I would probably just think about creating our own.

We're getting desperate. If anyone knows about a place in a kita in Berlin for a 2 year old, please let me know! Private or whatever, or some kind of coop.

<comment><USER21> why not learn to speak German?

<comment><USER20> I'm learning, but can't do this in a day or a month you know?

Ich kann Deutsche sprechen, aber ich bin langsam und nicht so gut. Leute haben oft keine Geduld, wenn man langsam ist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Looking at the problem from a game theory perspective, it looks like this to me:

Ambitious people want to live as close to as many other ambitious people as possible. So wherever the density of these 'Hipsters' or 'Cool People' increases, the desirability of the area increases. And by law of supply and demand, prices go up.

The willingness and ability to pay higher rent decides who can live in those 'cool areas'.

Now the 'cool people' might say to the landlords: "Hey, it's US who make this area cool! Not your houses! Why do we have to pay you for it?".

It's an interesting point. Is it fair? I am not sure. Maybe. The same argument could hold for Facebook, YouTube or Reddit. It's the users that create all the value. Yet the platform providers extract most of it.

I think that before we can form an opinion on different types of regulation, we should ask: If not willingness and ability to pay rent decides who lives where - what or who will decide instead? And what will be the result?

<comment><USER23> Very interesting point, and comparison to social media. It seems to me that if most of the users of Facebook, Reddit, etc, were to band together and leave to somewhere they get a better deal - then the value of those sites would effectively become zero. If they could just wield it well, they have massive bargaining power in those relationships. But the cost of organizing such groups, building a new suitably-featured site, and moving there is a large limiting factor. The same relationship could be extended to most networks - including city/housing networks. But staging this mutiny on social media sounds tough enough - in real life real estate, I imagine it's nearly impossible! As such, landowners get a hefty upper hand, and there's not much power the tenants can wield in that negotiation - even if they do collectively provide most of the real estate value of a property.

That said... what if this bias in network effects isn't eternal, and we humans just haven't been very good at group organization so far? I can imagine a userbase mad enough at Facebook might pick a date a year from now, get everyone they possibly can to sign up to leave on that day, and mass-migrate to an equivalent site with similar features (which doesn't farm $250 a year off each person in data - or at least gives those funds back to the user). With smart contracts to ensure commitment to the move, it could even be a fully-funded and well-organized migration - which might even have negotiation options to abort if Facebook met their demands. People would probably even do it just for the spectacle/coolness factor of being part of such a big rebellion. It's a bit of a pipe dream, sure, but it's conceivable something like this could happen. And let's face it, other than the data/hosting challenges, most of these big social media sites aren't doing anything that difficult to replicate. Hell, I'd go so far as to say almost any company worth the big bucks is mainly being priced on brand and network effects (minus IP/asset ownership). If the networks underlying this got better at organizing and moving/threatening-to-move to alternatives, they could eat that value and pass it down to consumers. Hell, it might even work out that they could be paid to use these services.

The city/housing space is one I'd imagine would be wayyy slower to benefit from any of these potential consumer unions technologies due to physicality constraints, but I imagine it too could be translated into these mutinys. e.g. People could agree to leave a city en-masse to a new one with better (pre- negotiated) rent/ownership prices, leaving the old city high and dry in a bubble-bursting scenario. Of course we don't see this now - or at least, not in any organized form, just an economic drying-up when e.g. a factory closes and tenants can't afford their rent. But perhaps it's possible in the future as mobility, communication and coordination increase? Who knows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Surprised there's no mention yet in this thread of Land Value Tax [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax)

It's an effective way to encourage development of more housing, and reclaim some of the costs associated with rising demand for real estate.

<comment><USER19> The problem with many German cities are that they are already full. Infrastructure can't keep up with the population. The building density is so high that it's very difficult to find room for more streets or rails, more schools and other public buildings. Parks are overcrowded at weekends. I think the only solution is to get people out of the cities (or maybe build new cities).

<comment><USER24> I find that hard to believe. Most German cities are low-rise, not skyscrapers. Elsewhere in this thread, somebody mentioned that Berlin's population today is still below its pre-WWII high.

<comment><USER25> It was about 4m before the war. Is not about 3.6 Considering that today's living arrangements (sqft per person) is quite different (larger) than 80 years ago, I am not sure this is working argument.

<comment><USER26> The simple solution is to build _up_. Build residential buildings twice as tall and suddenly having larger living units doesn't seem crazy. We have the technology today to build taller buildings than we did before WWII, more economically.

The central problem with all these discussions about housing prices is construction. There isn't enough of it, it's too expensive in some places for what you're getting, the whole thing is completely broken and needs to be fixed. It should not be hard to build new housing units to modern standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Regulate behaviour, not ownership.

If you want landlords to behave better, then rather than keeping them small, stick limits on what they can do.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, that was my impression when reading the article as well.

If the problem is that new landlords are raising the rent by inordinate amounts, maybe that is what you should restrict instead.

Though I'm not really opposed to breaking up big landlords either, it feels a bit disingenuous to punish people (or companies) for success.

<comment><USER25> > it feels a bit disingenuous to punish people (or companies) for success.

Have been there as well. My current position on this is, that the sources for success are hardly one dimensional. Sure hard work helps, but it also helps to happen to have good contacts, be born rich, be beautiful and tall, been grown up in the right social circles, having met the right people etc. So it's less punishing hard work, and more creating a balance with those less lucky.

<comment><USER29> While I agree that there's many factors that go into success anyone looking to control for luck at scale had better be willing to rack up an impressive body count because those kinds of systemic changes to society are never peaceful. People will not just accept being told they do not deserve what they have and that it is the result of luck. You are not going to get people to give up what they have without a lot of force.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In the U.S., this limit is expressed via property taxes and homestead exemptions; a person living in a building that they own received a ~25% discount on their property assessment;

</comment><comment><USER31> Not a hard limit. Just progressive tax that makes owning much real estate very expensive and in effect unprofitable.

<comment><USER32> Tax is not policy and not punishment. Get over that.

<comment><USER29> It walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. The only people who say it's not a duck are the ones who want to make their particular pet duck seem more agreeable to people who do not particularly like said duck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I moved from Belgium to Berlin 2 months ago. To me Berlin looks really spread out compared to Belgian cities and a lot of other big cities. To test my feeling I just checked this map [1]. It's clear that the population density in Berlin is lower than in other European cities like London or Paris. Even smaller cities like Brussels, Copenhagen and Stockholm are denser.

So I think there is still is a lot of potential to relax zoning laws and let more homes be built. This is the best way to lower rents imo.

[1] [https://pudding.cool/2018/10/city_3d/](https://pudding.cool/2018/10/city_3d/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Nope, because they'll just setup a load of shell companies.

<comment><USER35> I'm not saying that this would work but as a thought experiment:

Any entity that buys a house zoned as residential has to pay a tax of 100% of the value of the house.

Private citizens get an exemption on this tax, if their main residence of which you can only have one, and are 18 or older.

CGT is 100% (Deductions for home improvements could be added)

The municipality builds affordable housing

The tax would probably need to be gradually increased as it would likely cause a bit of crash on the housing market, say over 10 years.

There is an obvious lack of political will to carry out such a measure and I'm sure that there are loads of unintended consequences

<comment><USER25> Won't work. Due to higher property sales taxes here in Germany, any building complex worth more than a couple million is already owned by a shell company. If the building is to be sold, they sell the shell company instead to not have to pay property sales tax. Such a law would simply result in each building be wrapped in a shell company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> All you people claiming that the only way to reduce housing costs is to build more housing are missing the other only way to reduce housing costs.

Remember, there is not only supply but also demand.

We need to reduce population growth to below zero. A sustainable world population is probably close to 0.9B, far less than the current level of about 9B, and significantly less than projected "stable" population of around 11B

Current world population is expansionist and we are down to less than 300 years worth of phosphates, with no plans to reclaim phosphates from the ocean.

<comment><USER37> That doesn't work because it's not only general population growth that's driving housing shortages in cities, it's that people are moving to popular cities from less popular places. San Francisco doesn't have a housing problem because too many people had babies in the last 10 years, it has a housing problem because way more people want to move to San Francisco from other US cities than it can support.

Another way to think about it: Japan's population is flat or declining depending on the stat you look at, but Tokyo is still increasing in population.

<comment><USER36> Is Japan's population currently 1/10th of its peak?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yes, housing is a right not a speculation opportunity. Also there should be opportunities for people to get their own houses, like cheap credits with a monthly payment close to the rent.

<comment><USER39> >Yes, housing is a right not a speculation opportunity.

Let's say I agree with this idea and let's also ignore the fact that by stating it's a right, we are implicitly stating that someone else needs to pay for it with their own money if you cannot.

If housing is a right, does that necessarily mean that housing in a specific area is a right? I mean, I'd love a beachfront property in Maui but we can't all have that.

If we build a few million houses in the middle of Kansas and tell people "there is your free house, as is your right", is that enough? Or do people have a right to a free house somewhere just because someone in their family happened to be lucky enough to live in the same general area at some point in the past?

People in the US are generally allowed to move where they want. If a place becomes too expensive for them to live there, it's possible for them to move elsewhere if they must. I can definitely see that offering help with relocation could be good for society, and I can also see that having a mix of different people in an area is also good for society, but ultimately I don't agree that just because someone happened to pay rent at some point in the past, they and their descendants should be granted a perpetual right to stay in that proximate location forever.

<comment><USER40> > "I mean, I'd love a beachfront property in Maui but we can't all have that"

The person you're replying to is basically saying: "having a place you can stay in, to keep you alive and going rather than homeless and broken, a safety net in essence - should be a right". Your response: "but we can't hand over free beachfront properties in Maui for everyone".

You're diverting the discussion ("but look at what communism did to Venezuela"). This isn't about free beachfront properties or luxury homes in Maui. This is about a single bedroom apartment with the most basic of utilities for people that wouldn't otherwise have the money or means to afford anything better: students, older folks, sick people, people that face hardships.

<comment><USER41> This isn't just about having shelter, this is about having it _in Berlin_ specifically. Who is entitled to that? The answer can't be "everyone".

<comment><USER42> So people with money are entitled to it then?

<comment><USER43> There's no entitlement in trades between landlords and people with money - everything happens on mutually beneficial terms. Landlords own property by the right of their investment into it, which was also a mutually beneficial transaction between them and the developers who built it and got rewarded for their work.

<comment><USER42> Yes, these are the rules of a free market. But if a society or a governing body has additional priorities, rules can be added to such a framework. So, in the end it actually is a question about entitlement. Is a landlord entitled to rent to the highest bidder or not. I'm not saying I'm necessarily entirely against this concept, but I doubt it should be the default situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I've always thought that the advent of self-driving cars will contribute to urban sprawl and lower housing prices. I'd happily live somewhere with a 1 hr commute if rent was $3k/month cheaper and I could get work done on the way there and back with no distractions.

<comment><USER32> In some cities 1 hour commute is from one side of the city to the center or the other way around, not from suburbs to city. My commute is 1.5 hours per direction inside the city, going out would take more. Also spending 2 hours in a car, even self driven, is not the best way to spend your time. Otherwise you can live in a RV parked in front of your office.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I've lived in Berlin for 10 years now. I moved into my place 10 years ago this month and the rent would definitely go up without the rigid German laws to prevent exactly that. By at least about 30-40% I would estimate. That's walking distance from major landmarks like the Alexanderplatz, the Berliner Dom, and the synagogue on Oranienburgerstrasse. I pay a lot by Berlin standards but I live dirt cheap by any other standards. I don't know many places in Europe where I could live this cheap and that centrally. Around 950 euros a month for an 85m2 place, including heating cost. Very nice deal. You need to move quite far out of the center of most European capitals to find anything similar and forget about it in the bigger ones like London, Amsterdam, Brussels, or Paris.

However, that's not the point for the locals here. They've seen people move in over the last decades, claim their public space, and as a consequence their cost of living is going up like crazy and they are not getting a lot in return. That sort of thing creates a lot of resistance. There are a lot of people in Berlin that are not big earners. And only a few years ago they were still getting awesome deals on huge places right smack down in the middle of the coolest city in Europe (after 10 years, I know this is true). I had friends paying less than 600 euros for a 100m2 place. OK, it was in need of a bit of renovation but still. Of course that was never going to last. The same place probably goes for around 1500-2000/month now.

IMHO, as a foreign contributor to the gentrification, a lot of the housing shortage is artificial and it has a lot to do with the local legislation that is designed to conserve the status quo combined with the fact that the local government sold out early for way too low to big investors. At this point they don't have a lot of control because they sold out. Also, this city is growing like crazy and it has insanely high dept due to failed projects like e.g. the new airport that was supposed to open in 2012 an will probably not open for years to come.

So, they are kind of powerless to fix things and their political legitimacy is based on an electorate that would favor draconian measures. So, obviously that kind of thing is very popular with the locals. There's no money to build new stuff and besides they've sold all of the land on which this would need to happen. So, the next best thing is populist measures that don't actually solve the problem but make it look like they are doing something.

There actually is a lot of land in and around Berlin. This city is pretty far from other German cities so there is a lot of country side in all compass directions. Also inside the city there is plenty of space. This city still has less inhabitants than before WW II and the cold war (4.3M in 1939 vs, 3.7M last year). Thanks to the cold war it is kind of very spread out with lots of former no mans land, huge parks, etc. People strange to Berlin always ask where 'the center' is. There's no such thing. And there are at least two areas that could lay claim to that and half a dozen more that are probably more interesting in terms of nightlife, culture and other things you would find in most city centers else where. So, lack of land is not a problem in Berlin. Constructing things on it is. And housing projects for lower incomes is not a priority.

<comment><USER46> > a lot of the housing shortage is artificial and it has a lot to do with the > local legislation that is designed to conserve the status quo

Visit San Francisco for where this ends up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I do not think this implementation is a good use of taxpayer money or government effort.

      has developed a reputation for raising rents sharply by finding loopholes in Germany's fairly strict rental laws.

This is the item the government should rightfully be attempting to fix. Not acting as a market participant.

      In the meantime, the firm invests almost half as much as state housing companies do to keep its homes in good condition.

State actors regularly spend 2x-3x their private counterparts with the same results. The difference relates to additional studies and more onerous self- imposed tendering requirements that create no additional value for the end user but allow the state to feel it has made decisions and spent taxpayer money in a justifiable way.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is a certain je-ne-sais-qoui about people living on the Karl Marx Allee trying to stop a rich person from buying their homes.

From what I see though, the issue that started this is not that there are people controlling too much property, but there is a group of asshole landlords that use loopholes to increase the rent way to steeply.

</comment><comment><USER49> There is no need to put a hard limit, just an effective limit by having a general wealth tax. Money flows to where money already is, that's inevitable in a capitalist market economy. There's no need to change that, but progressively bigger piles of wealth should be progressively higher taxed to keep them in check, thus ensuring a competitive market.

Edit: I guess I should have known mentioning wealth tax would get people nervous. But this is not about taxing your old grandma for her paid-off house. This is about small but increasing percentage, starting at maybe $1M-10M and really kicking in at $1B and above. You can then abolish dividend taxing (that's only fair) and perhaps income tax altogether.

<comment><USER31> Taxing general wealth would be enough if you just wanted money. But what you want is rather change in the behaviour of the wealthy. You want them to take away their money out of real estate market so that it does not inflate the prices. You could achieve that through progressive real estate tax. This would make holding and renting large amounts of real estate less profitable in comparison to other things rich invest their money into. They would sell so prices would drop and individual ownership would rise.

<comment><USER49> I don't mean this specifically as a solution to expensive housing, just a general solution to super disparate wealth inequality. The point is not to get more money for the state (income tax could be abolished to offset) but to put a natural negative feedback mechanism on wealth accumulation, instead of the positive feedback mechanism that exists today and makes the uber rich own the world.

<comment><USER31> I don't think that the sheer fact of some people being incredibly wealthy does much harm and it also can do some good. When the money lands in the hands of rich people it essentially leaves the economy same way as if it was just burned because they won't be giving that money back to real world economy anytime soon. It just lowers inflation a bit so everything becomes a bit cheaper than it otherwise would be.

Rich people being rich is fine. Them buying luxuries for their money or gambling (casinos, stock market, startups) does very little harm and even some good because some of their money comes back to other people and few of them do something good with it.

The problem starts only when their money touches the parts of economy that are shared by other people because they drive the prices up by buying large amount of stuff and hoarding. Things like property or food or raw materials or land. We just need to make those activities unprofitable for them.

<comment><USER49> Sure, I've actually got nothing against rich people or even the idea of super rich people. But the whole system is set up in such a way that if you're wealthy you own the world and have to actively screw up to not get wealthier. The system just needs a tiny self-correction mechanism.

And the problem with immense wealth is not raising inflation or anything like that, that is market stuff that will correct itself. The problem is buying your way into policy control, and people/corporations that are so powerful that not even the law dares touch them.

<comment><USER50> Robert Kraft may have to disagree with you on your last assertion that the law can't touch rich people.

<comment><USER49> The law won't touch rich people where they care, their money. Why are there still tax havens? Why do corporations still make special tax exemption deals? Why are tax loopholes not as aggressively fought as drug smuggling?

And even the case you linked to, very wealthy people are much less likely to be charged with these kinds of crime as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NETduino - <AUTHOR> http://www.netduino.com/ <comment><USER2> In the past, I've had some projects that I'd like to have tried, if I knew what I was doing with circuitry. I have a feeling an Arduino (or Netduino) would have taken a lot of the pain out of it. But eventually, I'd probably want to make a version that didn't start with a $35 part, possibly to sell or let others make.

Is there a pretty clear path from starting with a 'duino and moving to custom set of components (assuming we're not talking about anything crazy complex like making a smartphone lol) or would it be essentially re-learning everything from scratch?

For example, the other day I wanted to plug a GC controller into a USB port. I'm pretty sure I could wire it up to a programmable chip and make that happen. I'm also pretty sure an 'duino would be easier. But would making one version make it easier to make the other?

<comment><USER3> You can pop the ATMega chip off of the development board and use it in place of the complete arduino. ATMega chips are pretty cheap (edit- I said $1 before but that may have been optimistic).

If you just want to plug a Gamecube controller into your computer this is probably a better option: <http://goo.gl/Y0nP9>

<comment><USER2> Actually, I've read bad things about that particular adapter, but I did have an alternative in mind. But thanks!

I didn't fully understand the ATMega bit, but I'm assuming it means I can even use the same C++ program and not have to rewrite it for a new chip? That would be an amazing way to go, if so. I had assumed I'd at least have to recompile for a different chip.

Edit: Looks like <http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Learning/AtmegaStandalone> explains it for me. Thanks for the tip! That's exactly what I needed to push me further.

<comment><USER4> Building your own Arduino clone is pretty straightforward - it's half a dozen components, under ten bucks. Once you get the hang of it you can prototype your design using an actual Arduino board, then simply integrate the components into your actual project and continue using the same firmware. I've done this many times.

<comment><USER5> The only gotcha with this is that you'll need a way to put the Arduino bootloader on new AVR chips, or pay a small premium to buy them preloaded with Arduino firmware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >> "Netduino is also pin compatible with Arduino shields."

I think this is an awesome idea. Writing code in the original Arduino C dialect was a bit frustrating (for a Java guy). Being able to write in a higher level language that interops with already available Arduino accessories is just fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER7> I saw a demo of a Netduino a .NET developers group in Raleigh, and was very impressed. It was extremely cool to see someone step through C# code in Visual Studio that was running on the board.

IIRC, the SDK runs on the Express (free) version of Visual Studio as well, so you really can get started for $35.

</comment><comment><USER8> now I want iDuino... an objective-c based open source embedded system. It's a pretty good startup idea actually, considering everything i-based product can charge more...

</comment><comment><USER9> Very nice. I've wanted to do an Arduino project for a while (or an Android ADK, or this) but I can't think of any project ideas. I don't want to create a remote controlled car, or a gmail notifier. I want to create something real, something useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> Are there any NETduinos that can handle more than 20 Gs of force out of the box?

<comment><USER11> Depends on the duration.

<comment><USER10> I know a guy that is basically looking for an MS Stack solution to a problem he is having. He makes displays for fighter jets and he would like to know if these can solve them. The only problem is that it is all military spec stuff, ergo question.

<comment><USER11> Whether the item works is the least of your problems when it comes to military jets. Trust me, if it's UK-mil it's a bureaucratic nightmare (expensive) to develop software that can be proven to be of high-integrity. To reduce costs you use stuff that has been proven safe before (we still use 8051s and wire- wrap).

Put simply, if the pilot makes decisions on how to fly (in flight or on later analysis) based on an electronic piece of equipment, it'll have cost shitloads. This fact is why I want to get out of mil-aero in the UK; developing embedded soft/elec is mostly about jumping through hoops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if .NET micro supports F#?

<comment><USER13> I actually asked a guy at OSCON, and no, F# is not supported. The CLR on the Netduino isn't complete and doesn't support every .NET language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've played with a netduino extensively. My only comment is that they are HIDEOUSLY SLOW and expensive compared to other similar platforms such as AVR+GCC and PIC. They are however convenient and easy to debug, which are the only positive things I can say.

I spend 70%+ of my time with .Net/C# happily so this is not a langauge/Microsoft bias.</comment>


Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html <comment><USER2> So, who is brave enough — or powerful enough — to actually try to really do anything about this problem?

China is the ultimate "too big to fail" problem, right?

<comment><USER3> The answer so far seems to be "nobody"

<comment><USER4> There's a bunch of brave students in HK that might vehemently disagree with you there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The documents released here describe high level directives from Xi Jingping, and some quotes on how family members should be told of detained relatives. Presumably there must be many other documents detailing design and construction of the large scale facilities that would be needed for the number people being detained; these might shed more light on the actual scale of what is happening. The documents so far could be describing programs that target 100's of people, not the millions claimed elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand why the BDS movement against Israel gets so much attention when stuff like this, or worse, regularly occurs in China. I have been making an effort to reduce what I buy from China recently, which is difficult in electrical engineering. I hope others consider the same. We need a BDS (Mainland) China movement.

<comment><USER7> > I don't understand why the BDS movement against Israel gets so much > attention when stuff like this, or worse, regularly occurs in China.

The reason could be echoes of old Soviet influence campaigns directed against Israel [1] [2]. Once you get an idea lodged in the public mind, it takes on a life of its own (kinda like the trope of the AI weapon that fights on even after its makers are dead).

[1] [https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and- culture/285781/sov...](https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and- culture/285781/soviet-anti-semitic-cartoons)

[2] This is a good presentation of Soviet disinformation tactics and strategy: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia- meddling-d...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling- disinformation-fake-news-elections.html) (youtube link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo))

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's quite shocking how blatantly China discriminates against everyone but Han-Chinese, yet doesn't even get a mention on [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_(politics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativism_\(politics\))

</comment><comment><USER9> Just anecdotally, every Chinese from China I've ever met has an obsession with how great China is. They always refer to ancient history. I'm pretty sure the communist party is coopting their history and cultural to create some sort of civilizational euphoria for the people, to achieve their goals. It really can't end well. It's funny because Americans will say America is the best country on earth, but they don't actually 100% mean it, like they know other places aren't bad too.

<comment><USER10> Chinese nationalism is trying to follow in the footsteps of Japanese nationalism of the early 20th century. We all know how that played out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Leaked CCP files reveal crimes against humanity (reddit.com)

Given a link to a Reddit article that merely links a www.nytimes.com I expect a flag asap.

Which is exactly what I assume the OP troll/Propagandaest wanted, else they would have linked the original article with the proper title.

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe these recent developments in the Chinese culture and psyche can be described as Han superiority complex much like Nazism. Victim mentality, belief in one's racial superiority, and willingness to do away with any ethnicities and cultures unlike your own. Maybe we need a term for this so we can identify and talk about it. Hanzism?

<comment><USER10> This is exactly my experience. The beliefs and utterances of many Chinese wouldn't be out of place in 1930s Germany, replacing the appropriate nouns. The scary thing is this has been going on for decades, just not visible to most outsiders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fascinating article.

I didn't realize this all started because of terrorist attacks,

> _In 2014, little more than a year after becoming president, he spent four > days in the region, and on the last day of the trip, two Uighur militants > staged a suicide bombing outside a train station in Urumqi that injured > nearly 80 people, one fatally._

> _Weeks earlier, militants with knives had gone on a rampage at another > railway station, in southwest China, killing 31 people and injuring more > than 140. And less than a month after Mr. Xi's visit, assailants tossed > explosives into a vegetable market in Urumqi, wounding 94 people and killing > at least 39._

> _Against this backdrop of bloodshed, Mr. Xi delivered a series of secret > speeches setting the hard-line course that culminated in the security > offensive now underway in Xinjiang. While state media have alluded to these > speeches, none were made public._

Xi's speech was enlightening too,

> _In several surprising passages, given the crackdown that followed, Mr. Xi > also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their > right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between > Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation's dominant ethnic group, and rejected > proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China._

> _"In light of separatist and terrorist forces under the banner of Islam, > some people have argued that Islam should be restricted or even eradicated," > he said during the Beijing conference. He called that view "biased, even > wrong." "We say that development is the top priority and the basis for > achieving lasting security, and that's right," Mr. Xi said. "But it would be > wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself."_

> _"In recent years, Xinjiang has grown very quickly and the standard of > living has consistently risen, but even so ethnic separatism and terrorist > violence have still been on the rise," he said. "This goes to show that > economic development does not automatically bring lasting order and > security."_

The NYT did a great job reporting the situation.

<comment><USER14> > I didn't realize this all started because of terrorist attacks

As did the Rohingya tragedy

<comment><USER15> It always "starts with" terrorist atrack, because those are such a powerful excuse for any kind of violent excess that if you want to do something otherwise indefensible and don't have those handy as an excuse, you first generate some for the excuse; see, e.g., Operation Northwoods.

And if you do have them, but they don't implicate the right targets, you engage in a propaganda campaign of conflation and false association—extra points if it can leverage common racial, ethnic, and/or broad religious identities—until they do, see, e.g., the US efforts re: 9/11 in the runup to the war with Iraq.</comment></comment></comment>


The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/06/artificial-intelligence-ai-humans-bots-tech-companies <comment><USER2> Am glad this is highlighted now. Back in 2015, when we wanted to build an meeting scheduling bot, we naively thought we could use only machines to get the job done. 3 months later we realized that was no way feasible, not then not in the next 10 years. So the common feedback we got was to just use low cost labor in India/Phillipines to get the job done. To us, that was a no-go because we kept privacy as the top criterion for doing anything with people's inboxes. Even after obfuscation, we didn't want any human to read or parse soeone's private messages. So we dropped the idea and shut shop. Sure we failed, but at least we were true to our conscience.

Another way to have tackled this problem was to just go down the research route and build a product once the ML was fully baked, but VCs won't fund such adventures.

To get VC funding, we had to lie through our teeth, which was a total no-go. I am not bringing the righteous argument, but for once I feel really good that our viewpoints held then are corroborated now, some kind of confirmation bias kicking in.

<comment><USER3> It's great that you stuck to your guns, but there's another ethical path forward: transparency. Many companies already pay third party employees to look at their schedule, so it's not a non-starter. And there are a few VCs out there that understand training costs for AI and are willing to engage with a journey that includes them - as long as the cards are on the table.

What we need is a set of accounting metrics about the cost of training and the rate of improvement, so that VCs can get comfy with how to make projections rather than choosing between buying snake oil and nit participating in the AI Dev cycle.

PS - emphatically _not_ taking aim here at your specific decision, OP. Startups have different opportunities and interests, and these decisions are tough. I'm sure you know better than I do whether the ethical wizard-of-oz model above is relevant to you in particular.

<comment><USER2> Thank you. The latter point about accounting metrics that you mention is very valid. I will think on these lines. I am very much interested in reaching out to VCs who are supportive and understand training costs for AI. If you know of any please do point out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I gave a lecture a couple of months ago called Developing your AI BS Detector addressing this very topic.

[https://adamdrake.com/developing-your-ai-bs- detector.html](https://adamdrake.com/developing-your-ai-bs-detector.html)

The main thesis is that there seem to be more and more companies out there solving interesting problems, which by itself is great, but they're bolting a lot of wording on top talking about AI. Most of this seems to be an attempt to differentiate themselves in the market and access funding and I find it incredibly dishonest.

The whole discussion around AI these days has become so tainted by scheisters trying to attract funding and attention that I actively try to distance myself from association.

We need to focus a lot more on Intelligence Amplification (IA) ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification)), i.e., building tools for humans to become more productive, and less on AI.

Douglas Engelbart and others had this figured out 50 years ago (see: the Mother of All Demos). The AI hype is dangerous, since it will no doubt lead to the trough of disillusionment.

<comment><USER5> Well the idea is that all emerging ideas with broad appeal go through the Hype Cycle. I don't know that AI is different or dangerous in that regard.

<comment><USER4> I'm not of the opinion that it is dangerous as an idea, but rather that the intentional deception I see on the AI topic is dangerous (not to mention unethical).

I can't think of a single example of an "AI" company I talked with who did not know that they were explicitly exaggerating their claims and capabilities for the express purpose of attracting funding and fueling the hype fire.

The solid tech startups I've seen are focused on the problem they are solving for customers rather than the tooling (AI).

<comment><USER6> Not to mention that AI as we define it does not actually exist yet. Anyone who uses that term is doing so dishonestly. Show me any intelligent code and I'll shut up. Until then I call BS on anything that's claims to be powered by AI.

<comment><USER7> I think you can reasonably call self driving cars AI without it being BS. Many things like translation may qualify based on how you frame the question, but driving is an open ended real world task.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My favorite example of this sort of thing, mentioned in the Guardian story, is the kerfuffle late last year when Expensify's receipt-reading SmartScan feature was found out to be partly backed by human receipt readers: [https://qz.com/1141695/startup-expensifys-smart-scanning- tec...](https://qz.com/1141695/startup-expensifys-smart-scanning-technology- used-humans-hired-on-amazon-mechanical-turk/)

(I don't file expenses often, but personally when I do so through Expensify, I find SmartScan so slow that I now assume _all_ my "SmartScanned" receipts are going to a human.)

<comment><USER9> Quote from the article

>How to start an AI startup

>1\. Hire a bunch of minimum wage humans to pretend to be AI pretending to be human

>2\. Wait for AI to be invented

<comment><USER10> Translation: _Lean Startup Concierge /Wizard of Oz MVP_. For anyone wanting to learn or refresh about that, here's a descent article I just Googled up (I reviewed a few and picked this one): [https://grasshopperherder.com/concierge- vs-wizard-of-oz-test...](https://grasshopperherder.com/concierge-vs-wizard-of- oz-test/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this article may be overstating a little.

First, the prototyping/bootstrapping with humans is not a terrible idea. It takes a hurdle, and moves it down the line a bit. You still need to get over that hurdle. It's still a potential failure point, but it's not an irrational approach. There are a ton of businesses started on the basis of.

      1. make free service
      2. get 1bn customers
      3. ???
      4. profit

Twitter, Google, Facebook... They deferred that little "make money" hurdle until they were ready for IPOs. Obviously, this opens a door for stupid plans, where the AI task will not be achievable. But, the "monetisation step" has comparable problems too.

The deception is a problem though, building companies based on deception _is_ a problem and will probably lead to a nasty crash.

Second, if the goal is a result rather than to use AI... Say you're trying to solve some specific transcription use case, like Spinvox or Expensify. First, the problem seems solvable or soon to be solvable. Second, it's helpful to have a stream transcription attempts coming to you with real life accuracy requirements. Third, it's not a bad way of approaching Human-AI hybrid systems. Start with 100% human labour and gradually hybridise. Maybe you never solve the hard problems that will get you to 100% AI, but you find ways of leveraging human labour to solve it efficiently.

If what they reach is a tech/process that allows a person to transcribe 10k words per hour... that's pretty good too.

<comment><USER12> _First, the prototyping /bootstrapping with humans is not a terrible idea_

Well, it might be. Are human drivers _really_ prototyping/bootstrapping self- driving cars? We are deeply into the territory of Moravec's Paradox here.

<comment><USER11> Interesting, care to elaborate?

For a lot of NN/ML applications, they magic ingredient is "humans" and a record of humans doing something enough times to describe statistically. AI sign recognition, sentence completion or checker playing is very often based on estimates of "what would a human do."

"Would a human say this photo contains cats", is really how a lot of ML interprets the question "where is my cat"?

<comment><USER12> _Interesting, care to elaborate?_

Moravec's Paradox is that everyone thought that sensory input would be easy and reasoning about those inputs would be hard. But it turns out that the sensory input part is very hard, much harder than anyone thought, and once you have that down, the reasoning is actually simple. So any service that is relying on humans doing the sensory input bit is handwaving away the difficult part. Humans aren't really aware of how much processing is involved in things we take for granted such as sight and hearing. We think that thinking is "special" but it requires relatively little power to do that once the underlying hardware/wetware has already processed the signals.

For example, a fundamental bit of logic is

        if pedestrian():
            apply_brakes()

Which is trivial... once you have a pedestrian() function that is.

 _" Would a human say this photo contains cats", is really how a lot of ML interprets the question "where is my cat"?_

Yes and no. If you ask a human, why do you think this is a cat, he or she will say, well look at the whiskers and the ears and the paws and the general overall cuteness. But an NN doesn't have a whisker coefficient or a cuteness multiplier. It doesn't "think" like a human and nor should we expect it to. ML that is more human-like is a decision tree, but once you start getting into random decision jungles and the like, the explainability starts to diminish.

<comment><USER11> I didn't mean that it thinks like a human, rather that it's thinking is based on a statistical aggregation of a bunch of humans thinking. 1,000 humans identify cats. Train an NN to identify cats based on that training set.

The point about the paradox is good one, and very relevant to this issue. I can't tell if it is a paradox about computers/intelligence or a point about people. I suppose it's all the same when it comes to building wizard of Oz companies. because Moravec's Paradox, you will probably misidentify what is the easy and/or hard part of the problem you are trying to solve with AI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great to see the Guardian referencing back to Spinvox here, whose speech-to- text service turned out to be largely run be sweatshop workers in the Phillipines; and a warning from history: This shtick works as long as you can transition to AI. If not, then the service will become increasingly flaky until the business collapses.

<comment><USER14> > a warning from history: This shtick works as long as you can transition to > AI. If not, then the service will become increasingly flaky until the > business collapses.

The business model "use low-paid labor to service wealthy clients" seems a little more inherently stable than that. In most cases, nobody expects a collapse. Why in speech-to-text?

<comment><USER15> Say you're not profitable, and raise money on the expectation that you can eventually lower costs and only then become profitable. If you then find out you can't lower costs (i.e. you can't automate something you could, and keep having to rely on more costly labor), then you eventually collapse.

<comment><USER16> Uber

<comment><USER17> Uber, Airbnb, others get their "partners" to provide the working capital.

This is a new take on the "value added reseller" business model. (I don't know what else to call it. Multi-level marketing?)

For instance, Autodesk's dealer channel covered the costs of marketing, sales, technical support, training, etc. While they kept the sweet nectar of profits for themselves.

<comment><USER18> > This is a new take on the "value added reseller" business model. (I don't > know what else to call it. Multi-level marketing?)

"franchising" ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Absolutely unsurprising given the current state of hype.

How to get rich: (A) Start a page that applies photoshop effects to user- uploaded pictures. (B) Secretly accomplish A using low-paid grunts. (C) Claim it's done with AI, obtain a billion dollars of VC money

<comment><USER20> You don't even need to do it secretly, just say it's the next step. See: Uber

<comment><USER21> But Uber has what seems to be world class Machine Learning (If that's not the heart of AI, what is?) lab. I am not well versed enough to compare it to Google's, or openAI, but is surely seems like they are at least trying to push the research envelope?

<comment><USER12> Evading regulators (Greyball) is a very different problem domain to self- driving cars

<comment><USER21> I was not speaking about either, actually,

[https://github.com/uber/pyro/](https://github.com/uber/pyro/)

and

[https://github.com/uber/horovod](https://github.com/uber/horovod)

Im by no means a machine learning expert, but sometimes on a Sunday i'll pour myself a mug of coffee and go through some neat tutorial, and sometimes the stuff is Ubers.

They are by no means free from criticism for their wrongs, but to ignore what they have done correctly paints the world far too simply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right.

I'm not saying that silicon/mechanical intelligence isn't possible. I'm unaware of any physical law that precludes it. But what we currently call "AI" is just the pathetic fallacy run wild.

All that said, multidimensional data-driven linear recognizers are pretty impressive.

<comment><USER23> > AI is nonsense. Dijkstra was right.

Define AI first.

One of the first few lines on Wikipedia about AI: The scope of AI is disputed: as machines become increasingly capable, tasks considered as requiring "intelligence" are often removed from the definition, a phenomenon known as the AI effect, leading to the quip, "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

<comment><USER24> > "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

If you can't replicate what a human do, it's not AI. The fact that we can only beat humans for very, very narrow applications/games and that we don't have a generalized model for learning is a clear failure of the AI hype.

<comment><USER15> It's totally valid to define AI this way.

But just keep in mind, when most people talk about AI, they're knowingly talking of something much more limited. So you're going to constantly have communication failures with people who are defining AI differently than you.

(Many people nowadays use the term AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] to mean what you think of as AI, btw).

<comment><USER24> Yeah I know about AGI but I dont like that term because it implies that the classifiers we have nowadays are good enough to be called "intelligence". They are just statistical models with great number of layers, nothing else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your description ("statistical models with great number of layers") tells me you're talking about neural networks. However, we have "nowadays" many classifiers that are not neural networks and therefore have no layers of any sort, like SVMs, KNN or logistic regression and are not even statistical, like decision trees/forests.

I should also point out that literally _all_ the classifiers "we have nowadays" as per your comment, have been known for at least 20 years (including deep neural networks).

I'm pointing all this out because your comment suggests to me that your knowledge of AI and machine learning in particular is very recent and goes as far as perhaps the last five or six years, when deep nets popularised the field.

If that is so- please consider reading up on the history of AI. It is an interesting field that goes back several decades and has had many impressive successes (and some resounding failures) that predate deep learning by many years. I recommend the classic AI textbook "AI- A modern Approach" by Stuart Russel and Peter Norvig. You'll notice there that, even in recent versions, machine learning is a tiny part of the material covered. Because there is so much more to AI than just deep neural networks, or statistical classifiers.

If I'm wrong, on the other hand, and you already have a broad knowledge of the field, then I apologise for assuming too much.

<comment><USER22> Peter Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp is a good read too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A lot of this comes from the availability of cheap hype-driven capital. The way it's supposed to work is that AI lets you replace expensive human labor with cheap computers so that a job that might've cost $10 in wages instead costs $0.0001 in server time. The way it actually works is that you tell a bunch of investors that you've got an AI that reduces the cost of X by a factor of 10,000, they give you $100M in capital, and now you have 10,000x the amount of money available, so you can pay the original $10 in wages and worry about how to _actually_ reduce the cost of X by 10,000 later, usually once it's clear that no more funding is forthcoming.

This is not really a healthy state for the economy, but seems to be how every technology wave happens. The real innovation will come when the cheap money dries up.

<comment><USER26> What they do could be a viable thing to do, if getting your customers to spend their own money to switch from a manual system with spreadsheet files sent over whatsapp to using your API will enable you to be the only player who has a huge dataset with real customer data, which you can use to understand which subset can actually be automated using existing technology, and automate only that using deep learning or whatever (for which you want the biggest dataset you can get), and keep doing the other stuff manually. You win by making people switch to your API, getting network effects, etc.

If you don't cut corners in the way you do the manual tasks and you charge enough to cover your costs, and enough tasks can be automated so that using your service is not more expensive than not using your service, you're ok. But you probably don't have the margins the VCs want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just the latest incarnation of the good old Mechanical Turk:

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

<comment><USER28> One of the services that you can use to implement pseudo-AI is also called that.

See [https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/mturk/](https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/mturk/)

<comment><USER29> Interestingly this service is also used to build the large data sets required to train certain ML models.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not quite on topic, but I can't help noticing the overused word "quietly" in the title of the story: [https://www.geekwire.com/2017/tech-news-sites- quietly-rely-w...](https://www.geekwire.com/2017/tech-news-sites-quietly-rely- word-create-drama-headlines-analysis-reveals/) (This is a rare case where the word might be appropriate, though!)

<comment><USER30> > Apparently whenever a tech company does anything without publishing a press > release and running ads during Monday Night Football, tech news sites have > decided that the best word to describe it is "quietly."

Yes, quietly means "without making noise". I don't know why geekwire is so breathless about using English language properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the term "artificial artificial intelligence" to describe this model

</comment><comment><USER31> Some colleagues of mine talk about the prevalence of companies doing this man behind the curtain thing all the time while claiming that there solution is AI/cognitive. When we come across examples of this happening we just refer to that Seinfeld Moviefone episode and say 'Why don't you just tell me [foo]' \- or whatever the "AI" is trying to solve.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSQ6q_rGpI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSQ6q_rGpI8)

It never fails to get a good laugh.

Anyway, I think that human interaction for the training aspects of AI to prepare data, label examples, test models, etc. is really hard to automate entirely and should be considered part of the development process. The execution side of an application component that is marketed as AI/cognitive however is not true AI unless it is totally free of human interaction.

<comment><USER32> _Even if_ the program was totally "free of human interaction", it shouldn't be marketed as "cognitive"—an exceptional word that requires exceptional evidence, when used in context of software.

Otherwise, it's all bovine manure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Echoes of theranos here. Putting AI aside, aren't these companies swindling their investors?

</comment><comment><USER34> It was my understanding that all AI technology/approaches need some sort of training. And that this training required some sort of human intervention to grade "correctness"

In companies that I have worked for that want to use AI; they always have a clause in the privacy agreement allowing employees to look at users' content in order to determine how well the algorithm was doing.

There are some differences: 1. PII was redacted (to the extent possible); 2. Customer could opt-out.; 3. the AI wasn't core to the service.

That said - sci-fi AI does seem to require humans behind the curtain.

Personally, I am more comfortable with a human being my virtual "AI" assistant than I am with real AI. I feel a human is less likely to make a mistake that will cause me personal damage, there is more responsibility/liability to doing a good job.

</comment><comment><USER35> Sounds a bit like the stripe (or is it square) story where every bank trnsaction was humanly done before they got the rights to automate it. I'm not surprised and i find it considerably smart considering all the money pouring into everything with a a machine learning buzzword attached to it.

</comment><comment><USER36> While deceiving your customers is maybe just wire fraud, deceiving your investors about this is securities fraud.

</comment><comment><USER37> X.ai barely works and it was pretty obvious that humans are behind it. It would make so many one-time non-systematic errors when there was almost no variance in the text.

</comment><comment><USER38> "The rise of 'pseudo-AI': how tech firms quietly use humans to do bots' work"

Does this include Uber's human drivers?

</comment><comment><USER39> I can already see how AI assistants call AI assistants to book an AI driven service for their AI bosses, to find out 0.3 seconds later that their AI boss being an AI doesn't need that service, calling again to remove the booking. Nobody notices that this happens, because no human is involved in the actual conversation. But of course both of these conversations lead to events where data needs to be transfered from the calendars to finance, billing etc. These transfers are done by humans of course because AI would be too expensive for that.

I see people going to work 16 hours a day handling transferring these transactions related to haircuts for AI bosses that don't physically exist (and therefore don't need haircuts), from one database to the other. The AI boss doesn't see the need for 8h workdays, because he's not human. And the money for the work doesn't need to be enough to afford living, right? The AI government will pay a base income to anybody anyways.

</comment><comment><USER40> This seems completely logical to me. A new business needs humans to train their AI. So why not use them to bootstrap your business while you're at it?

When we have transfer learning or one-shot learning, it will be a different story.

<comment><USER33> Sounds reasonable as long as you are not lying about what the company does.

<comment><USER41> Under those conditions we would have never got chlorinated water, saving billions of lives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is a good way to quickly build an MVP to gauge customer demand before incurring the time and expense of building a real scalable product.

<comment><USER43> So, deceiving your customers about how their data is being handled is a "good MVP". With this much cynicism you must be an "enterpreneur".

<comment><USER42> Where is the deception? Why should the customers care how the service is implemented on the back end? Unless the service lies and claims the data will never be seen by humans then they're not doing anything unethical. All that matters is whether customers are getting value from it.

<comment><USER43> Because if a service offers to automatically tag my photos, I don't expect random people looking at them. In fact, I don't want _anyone_ looking at my family photos other than those whom I explicitly gave permission to do so.

Same applies to my voice recordings. Same applies to my receipts. Same applies to my health data.

<comment><USER42> Unless your data is encrypted using keys that only you control then you have to assume that random people are looking at it. That is inherent in the nature of SaaS.

<comment><USER43> Technically yes. But since GMail became widespread, there's a tacit agreement that my data won't be looked at by random humans.

<comment><USER44> Is there? It's an inherent part of the service that Gmail software reads your mail (including until recently, for advertisement). How do you expect developers to work on that software without, at least occasionally, looking at the real inputs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> So, the worst of both worlds -- inflexible responses that aren't even scalable to demand.

</comment><comment><USER46> Fake it 'til you make it!

</comment><comment><USER47> One issue with Artificial Intelligence is that it is typically referred to and understood in a way that concludes it is similarly functional in its domain as actual (i.e. human) intelligence would be. In reality AI is more akin to artificial cheese. Artificial cheese is _not_ cheese just made with different ingredients. It is something vaguely cheese like made in a way completely dissimilar to real cheese.

</comment><comment><USER48> See also: the front page of HN. You didn't think that was an algorithm choosing which stories you see, did you? :)

It works well. And considering how much effect HN has on our daily lives, it's neat that the algorithm reduces to "this human has good taste."

I see no reason why HN won't be around for decades. And that's exciting. It's the only newspaper that feels like a community.

This used to feel strange — if you think about the position of influence and power HN commands, it's hard to feel ok about ceding control to a handful of people, no matter how benevolent. And on certain topics this has indeed been an issue —- if a certain behavior or conversation isn't tolerated on HN, it's easy to feel like you're a misfit who doesn't belong in tech, or even that you don't identify with the tech community.

One way to become comfortable with this situation is to trust incentives, not people. The only way HN wins is if HN stays fascinating. It's why most of us keep coming back: to monitor the pulse of the tech scene, or to learn physics factoids[1], or to spot a new tool that saves you hours.

And that's why HN can't be fully automated. Which stories fascinate you? If you could write an algorithm to generate an endless stream of interesting content, you'd have invented an AI with good taste. And for the moment, that's beyond our capabilities.[2]

[1] As the earth orbits the sun, the area swept out by the triangle formed by the sun->earth->earth3WeeksLater is equal to the area of the triangle during the next three weeks, and the next three weeks after that, and so on. Equal time periods = equal areas. That's why the earth moves faster when it's closer to the sun: it has to cover a greater distance in order to sweep out the same area as during the previous 3 weeks. This gives you an intuition about how gravity behaves. And with a slight tweak it also holds true for e.g. an ice skater twirling around. If you stick your leg out while spinning, your leg sweeps out more area than when it's near your body. That's why you spin more slowly: if you're sweeping out more area per time period, your rotation must slow down proportionally. (This is conservation of angular momentum, dressed up in intuitive clothing.)

[2] This is in contrast with sites like YouTube, which give an endless stream of interesting videos. Part of HN's strength is it's unified front page. We all see the same thing. And that's why writing an algorithm to make the front page interesting is much harder than creating a personalized neural network trained to show you all the interesting things you haven't seen yet.

<comment><USER34> Youtube's algorithm is designed to give the viewer stuff similar to what they have already seen. Be it Goto Conference videos, Nazi rants, or wacky people doing fingernail designs. Youtube's AI is not designed take chances and offer up something 'surprising'. 'Surprising' might be offensive not enlightening.

<comment><USER30> "Similar" also might be offensive not enlightening.

YT has a problem with trolls and harassers posting reaction videos that YT gets tricked into thinking are "similar".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Not sure guardian understands how training AI works.

<comment><USER50> There is a difference between labeling training data and just using humans to do the work. Some things cannot be achieved yet even with lots of labeled training data but companies are pretending they have solved hard ML problems at a high level of performance when the technology and research aren't there yet.

<comment><USER51> But why should it matter for customers who does the job? I mean, if you don't tell anybody, and pretend it's 100% AI then it's bad, but if it "will eventually become AI", and your investors and everybody interested in the technical details know how it's actually done, then what's wrong? A true "AI" should be able to pass a Turing test, so for the customer, it should be indistinguishable, and shouldn't matter.

Of course, the privacy concerns are there, but then again, if it's a real "AI", then it may be worse for the computer to read your data than for a random low paid worker ;)

<comment><USER50> Because the business costs don't scale well unless they can invent technology to remove the humans and for harder ML problems that currently isn't possible. The business is only based on being able to sell they hype of "AI" to investors.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Going from blog posts to full launches - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2015/12/26/from-blog-posts-to-launches/ <comment><USER2> Great post.

How do you deal with schedule slip? You have some things on there (like analyst briefings) that I've found take more than 2 weeks to schedule. This means nailing down a launch date 6-8 weeks out, which in my mind leaves significant engineering slip risk.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I've found it's a great soft deadline for being pretty feature complete and in a rough demo mode ahead of the launch. With analyst pre-briefings about 50% of the time the demo is ready and 50% it isn't. Since they're pre-briefings it's usually a little friendlier so not as critical to be super fine tuned on it. As you get to analyst briefings and then to press briefings the demo and product being ready does become more critical of course.

If I'm that worried about schedule slip, I won't start the process until everything is almost done. This then tends to create a greater push/pull between launching and engineering so being at least within the ballpark on timing makes the push/pull a bit easier.</comment></comment>


Chess Is Not an RPG: The Illusion of Game Balance - <AUTHOR> http://johnwickpresents.com/games/game-designs/chess-is-not-an-rpg-the-illusion-of-game-balance/

<comment><USER2> While I agree with the author's notian that "some games need balance others don't"[1] I disagree with the premise.

The author says that roleplaying games don't need balance because they are about telling stories, and that "other games" need balance because they are about the challenge, gameplay and competition. I kind of agree with this.

Then he goes on to caracterize games by their capabiblity of being played withour roleplaying. By this logic, he then says that not only World of Warcraft is not a roleplaying game, but Dungeons and Dragons isn't one either.

This is followed by "You can play board games such as Rex and Battlestar Galactica and even Settlers of Catan without roleplaying… but roleplaying seems to make them more enjoyable. [...] but if you go too far in that direction, you'll lose. And the goal of those games is to win. Roleplaying, in the end, sabotages the goal of the game."

"...try playing games such as Vampire or Pendragon or Our Last Best Hope or World of Dew or Deadlands without roleplaying, you're missing the entire point of the game."

This, in internet lingo, is what is called "BadWrongFun", i.e. you can't have fun playing a game in a way different than the intended by the authors.

I don't think there is such a thing as "BadWrongFun". I have this ruleset, I should be allowed to do with it whatever I want. I can roleplay in chess. I can call my knight Tim and have him be the queen's brother. And when he is captured, the grieving queen only moves half the distance. And I can also have a highly tactical dungeon crawl in (let's pick a narrative focused roleplaying game) FATE, completely ignoring setting, theme and story, throwing challenge after challenge at the players. Both of these are OK, and many more.

IMO, the problem with the authors logic is the idea of the objective or point of the game. That when you play Chess you want to win, when you play WoW you want to level up, and when you play a roleplaying game you want to craft and experience a story. I'll refute this with an example:

The "point" of the car is to help people move around and carry goods. But there are people who like to race cars. There are people who like to tune them and modify them. And some like to collect them. Because what people do with something doesn't always match its purpose.

Therefore, there is nothing wrong with roleplaying chess, or being a min- maxer[2] in a roleplaying game. People can do whatever they want with their games. Losing in chess is not bad if the player didn't care for winning or losing in the first place.

To finish my rant, here's my last thought: All games need balance, some more than others. But the balance required for a game depends on the context of the gaming session and the players goals for that gaming session.

[1] And I'd reiterate it as "some games need more balance than others" [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min-maxing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min- maxing)

</comment><comment><USER3> _You don't get to say, "I have a high charisma because I'm not very good at roleplaying."

My response to that is, "Then, you should get better at it. And you won't get any better by just rolling dice. You'll only get better by roleplaying."_

No. Some people are both _not good at speaking under pressure_ , but _want to be part of a story where their character is a good diplomat_. I have a player like that. Telling her, "sorry, you don't get to roll, suck it up and get better at talking" is a surefire way to lose a player and a friend.

Must she select the topic of discourse? Of course; players are expected to make decisions for their own characters.

Must she come up with an eloquent convincing ex temporaneous speech? Hell no. That's as stupid as forcing your players to solve a real-life puzzle or riddle to progress in the story.

\-----

On another note, combat statistics serve a very important purpose in a roleplaying game: they serve as a neutral referee, a "higher authority". Call it a crutch if you will, but allowing the combat to progress as the dice dictate precludes me (the GM) from unconsciously projecting unfair biases onto the outcome of combat actions.

A player will often have one idea what their weapons can do, while the GM has another. (Other players may even have a third opinion!) Mismatch in these expectations is a sure way to kill player morale. Fixed statistics eliminate this potential source of GM-player friction by codifying agreement of weapon capabilities.

Note that impromptu skill checks follow a similar code: if the player proposes their character do something "creative", the GM can fall back to the system of skill checks and situational bonuses to derive a reasonable DC for the die roll(s). Often this may be negotiated with the player. Like weapon statistics, this method eliminates (perceived or real) favoritism and helps the game progress more smoothly.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's a good point, but this isn't new info.

Every RPG rulebook I've ever read has a preface or afterword where they say something to the effect of "These rules aren't set in stone, this is your game! If a roll will take the story in an unsatisfying direction, or a rule is getting in the way of your players' enjoyment, throw it out!"

In fact, that might be a better litmus test for what distinguishes a role playing game from other kinds of games: do the rules direct you to break the rules whenever it would be more fun?</comment>