The Police Are Still Out of Control - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/10/the-police-are-still-out-of-control-112160_full.html#.VEphefldV1B <comment><USER2> I think much of the fault lie with the DA's and Police Unions. They're elected to do some job, which is to prosecute criminals, yet fail to do so when it is a police officer. The Unions are out of control in some instances making it so the police force cannot fire a crooked cop until he has been found guilty, in a criminal case. If the DA will not prosecute an officer he remains on the force, a liability to the citizens and their money, when ultimately he or she is sued in civil court.

On the issue of suing police, I find it interesting that most of thee civil cases are settled before a verdict. The police admit no wrong-doing yet fork over 2 million dollars.

I'm not entirely sure what should be done about the situation.

<comment><USER3> I am fine with police not being able to be fired until found guilty. I personally think it should be that way everywhere for everyone. For instance, the cases of a student being ejected from a university due to unsubstantiated rape claims that never hit court because there's nothing to prosecute with.

Now, whether they are _active_ officers is a completely different matter, and they should not be permitted to active duty until pending cases are resolved.

Finally, settlements are not a legal judgement of guilt nor acquittal. The only thing that can decide that is a court case. Often, they are a pure risk vs reward decision. If the downside of losing a case is $50+ million and they estimate their chances of losing at equal to or more than 5% -- in other words, still very confident of winning -- then it makes financial sense to settle for $2 million instead.

<comment><USER4> > I am fine with police not being able to be fired until found guilty.

I don't understand this at all. There are all sorts of terrible things that are not quite illegal. You killed that drunk guy that took a swing at you? Not guilty, but still not good behavior. You were a real jerk to a bunch of citizens, but you didn't actually assault them? Not guilty, but still not good behavior.

<comment><USER3> If the officer did not do anything illegal, then what right do we (as a society) have to fire them? Are they somehow supposed to be more "moral" (for some definition thereof) than the rest of the populace? Because there won't be anything but disappointment with that attitude. There's no reason to romanticize cops as somehow being better than every other person in their society.

Also, these statements are purely as applies to pending court cases, because cops sometimes _do_ have to do things that would otherwise be illegal for anyone else. And it can take a court case to decide if one particular occasion met those necessary criteria. However, if it's deemed that a cop is not meeting some other performance criteria of their job, then that's a different matter altogether.

<comment><USER4> There are 2 different issues here, whether or not an action constitutes a crime and burden of proof.

We might agree on the first issue.

>However, if it's deemed that a cop is not meeting some other performance criteria of their job, then that's a different matter altogether.

Would you consider a police officer unnecessarily killing a violent drunk to be "not meeting some other performance criteria"?

On the issue of burned of proof we disagree. Employment is a voluntary agreement. If I am your employer and I no longer want to employ you because I am convinced you are a criminal, then that is my call. If I want to lock you in a cage because I am convinced you are a criminal, that is not my call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of people think that when a local politician has the support of the police, it's a good endorsement.

All that means is that the police union has the politician in their pocket.

Same thing when a politician has the support of the teachers union.

It puzzles me when people vote against their own interest by voting for these endorsed politicians. It's much better to have someone there who will have a better chance of representing the voters rather than the unions.

<comment><USER6> [http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/](http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/) "The Authoritarians" (full ebook in link) provides some insight into this. That said, beware being in an anti-authoritarian bubble in your daily interactions; it will make it a lot harder to understand the authoritarian- follower mind.

<comment><USER7> Serving jury duty will fix that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I find fascinating is that there is less natural conflict of interest in being a police officer than there is in being a politician.... and yet people are willing to believe police are corrupt (and some are, no doubt) but so unwilling to believe it about politicians.

This, even after a decade of revelations ranging from Bush's illegal collection of phone metadata, the creation of the TSA (in violation of the 4th amendment) to the NSA spying Snowden exposed and the installation of porno scanners (which I think under most state laws, when used on children constitute child pornography, and if a child gets patted down, it's pretty close to molestation-- as the statutes are written and applied to civilians.)

It's like, to a lot of people, somehow when the government does it, with a plausible sounding rationalization, the laws of morality don't apply.

In fact, even the laws of the law don't apply. The fourth amendment trumps anything congress can pass. State laws still are in force, even if congress authorizes something (e.g.: it can be legal at the federal level but a crime at the local level.)

The government violates its own laws with impunity-- without even an investigation in most cases. Where's the special prosecutor to root out the criminal activity at the NSA? Instead it's just a manhunt for snowden. Yet people are very upset about "net neutrality" (which is a legitimate issue, but far less damaging than the panopticon)

I don't understand this.

<comment><USER9> The 4th amendment does not ban searches and seizures without a warrant. It bans "unreasonable" searches and seizures without a warrant. If the founders hadn't meant for the courts to try and distinguish between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" searches, they wouldn't have used the word. But they did--they embedded this balancing between privacy rights and the needs of law enforcement in the very text of the 4th amendment.

All of the programs you mentioned, phone metadata collection, the TSA, fall within the recognized contours of what the Supreme Court has recognized as "reasonable" searches.

Now, that's not to say that the Supreme Court's interpretations are the best ones, or that people can't advocate for a different interpretation. What it does mean is that the people supporting these programs can do so with the entirely good faith belief that they are not violating clearly established Constitutional law.

<comment><USER10> _' It bans "unreasonable" searches and seizures without a warrant.'_

It bans unreasonable searches and seizures, period.

Hopefully, a warrant will only be issued when the search is reasonable, and a search with more oversight and checks will be more reasonable than the same search without.

<comment><USER11> The Fourth Amendment does not demand a warrant for every search. Only on Internet message boards has this not been a settled issue since before our grandparents were all born.

To understand why the Fourth Amendment governs both searches and warrants, it's helpful to read up on what a "General Warrant" was at the time of the founders. Hint: they often didn't really have much to do with generating evidence.

The Amendment has two goals: first, to give the courts, rather than Congress or the President, authority in determining what a valid search is, and second to ensure that no branch of government could arbitrarily generate a piece of paper authorizing police to turn someone's house inside out.

<comment><USER10> I think you misinterpreted me. I didn't say every search must have a warrant. I said every search must be reasonable, and that a warrant makes _some_ otherwise-unreasonable searches reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Okay, okay, already: What the heck are the rules, the _real_ rules? Obviously, everyone needs to know the rules. I need to know the rules, that is, the _real_ rules. E.g., what am I supposed to do in routine interactions with the police?

I'm just a Ph.D. applied mathematician and software guy writing code and gathering data for my start-up I hope people will like; the project is for nothing illegal, immoral, objectionable, offensive, politically incorrect, etc.

But if the project works, then I'll have to get out from where I am now, get out from behind my desktop computer writing code and gathering data, get out into the community, have a light truck for my business, rent office space, contract for routine services, say, water, electric power, Internet access, telephones, trash pickup, hire people, get business insurance, a bookkeeper, an accountant, a lawyer, make some use of consultants, do billing, handle revenue, pay taxes, etc.

I will need routine police protection against vandalism and theft, etc.

And maybe there will be police walking a beat near my offices.

So, then, I may have some interactions with the police. Then, I need to know what are the _rules_. What are the real rules?

<comment><USER13> Hire a private protection business, including physical site security devices that send alarm notices directly to that business, and NOT to the local police. You have to pay for the local cops, but there's little they hate more than handling multiple false intrusion alarms from small businesses, and they have no legally enforceable obligation to protect you or your business. That won't stop them from sending you a bill for responding to a false alarm, even if they arrive 6 hours after receiving it.

Aside from making your first line of defense private security, make offsite backups for all your business records, and refresh them regularly. Insure your business against damages from typical property crimes, and against potential liabilities for visitors to your premises, and follow your agent's advice on things to do that will decrease your premiums. Hire a registered agent so that legal documents do not arrive via deputy at your regular office.

The best interaction you can have with the cops is to never need one or see one. Second best is to be assisted by a cop that acts with honesty, respect, and professionalism. Beyond that, results will vary drastically according to your locale.

Rule number one is to _not have_ routine interactions with the police. (Unless you're running a doughnut shop, I guess.)

<comment><USER12> MANY thanks. That's a keeper. I'll index it so that I can find it when I need it.

Some of what you said I'd guessed but didn't know the details or the level of importance you made clear. E.g., I suspected that I needed business insurance, but I've been unclear on all the reasons why.

The rest, I didn't know. Yup, I'm learning now.

Partly I was wondering if it was expected and required and in practice permitted to make gifts, say, cash to the local police. I very much hoped not, and would have checked with a street-wise, SMB lawyer. Your advice of just do _not_ have routine interactions with the police sounds about right.

Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Well-Aimed and Powerful (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2015/07/07/well-aimed-and-powerful/amp/ <comment><USER2> "Soon, of course, we'll be doing nothing at all. Faced with the fact that we are losing American spaceflight altogether, suddenly the workhorse shuttle seems as beautiful and daring as the Saturn V did in the sixties."

Hard to believe this was written in 2015, while SpaceX was busy sending dragons to ISS and learning how to land Falcon 9s.

Edit: the excerpt is from Leaving Orbit, _published_ in May 2015, but written in 2009, prior to the last Shuttle flight in 2011, which explains the sense of sadness and loss.

</comment><comment><USER3> Man has never landed on the moon. Especially not in 1969. Not only would they not have been able to get a person there, but to bring them back as well is ridiculous. Especially in light of the political situation at that time with Russia.

</comment><comment><USER4> > [...] and refrained from considering the enormity of their undertaking

Sigh. Another perfectly good word dies due to being too similar to another word.

At least we're still adding new words to the language to make up for these losses in expressiveness and shades of meaning. "Bigly", "sexting". "Cromulent".

<comment><USER5> Hey, deceiving a planet full of people with a made up moon landing seems pretty evil to me :-)

(I actually share your sadness about the massive extinction of expressive terms, but given the discussion in the article I couldn't resist).

<comment><USER4> It actually pulled me out of the article for a second as I thought, "wait, is this actually about how the moon-hoaxers are _right_?" before I realized the writer'd meant _enormousness_ —which is still not a great choice for that sentence, but at least doesn't mean something else entirely from what was intended.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, until I read this comment, I had no idea what your parent comment was referring to, i.e. the misuse of _enormity_. I'm kind of an annoying pedant about the misuse of "begs the question", among other things, but I'll admit to have equated "enormity" with "enormousness", the latter of which I can't remember the last time I ever saw it used in prose.

You're right to point out the flaw; professional editors are supposed to pick that kind of thing out.

<comment><USER5> Hah, looks like whoever downvoted my comment didn't know the word either!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Bart Sibrel._

<comment><USER7> If you don't mind giving the antagonist more views, he posted the video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OROlF8zB9z0&t=50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OROlF8zB9z0&t=50s)

For "some reason" the sound is cut out afterward...

> _"Did you get that on camera?" This line of dialogue, spoken so clearly and > happily, subsequently helps to acquit Buzz Aldrin, seventy-two years old at > the time of the incident, of assault charges._

<comment><USER6> _If you don 't mind giving the antagonist more views_

Not at all, it's not like he can buy anything with those views. On the other hand, it's awesome to see Buzz Aldrin punch that guy.</comment></comment></comment>


Muxtape open source clone OpenTape - <AUTHOR> http://opentape.fm

<comment><USER2> Open source doesn't magically solve the copyright issues that are hurting Muxtape. Creative commons is the "open source" solution to that problem

<comment><USER3> I think they're trying for more of a "fight the power" kind of solution. If everybody and their brother is running OpenTape, shutting down web-based mixtapes becomes prohibitively difficult.

<comment><USER4> Are you running it yourself? :)

 _If everybody and their brother is running OpenTape, shutting down web-based mixtapes becomes prohibitively difficult._

That's what they said about P2P and RIAA is still suing hundreds and hundreds of people. Muxtape clones are gonna be even easier to shut down.

<comment><USER3> _Are you running it yourself? :)_

You seem to be implying that my argument is invalid unless I am running OpenTape. I disagree. I am presenting an argument, not professing my belief system.

 _That's what they said about P2P and RIAA is still suing hundreds and hundreds of people._

RIAA is suing hundreds of people. Considering the hundreds of millions of people sharing mp3s, that's down in the noise floor. It's more likely that you'll slip and kill yourself in the bathtub than get sued by RIAA (National Safety Council says the odds of a fatal fall in the bathtub are one in 11,469).

<comment><USER4> No, my argument is perfectly valid. You're implying that running OpenTape is easy. So I asked you where is yours.... to see if you practice what you preach. Running OpenTape is not easy at all. You need an ISP account, some knowledge of how to upload stuff, knowledge of how to set up a web app, some knowledge of PHP also might be necessary. So the number of OpenTape users is very small indeed.

And not to mention the EASE with which you'll get your ISP account shut down. An ISP will shut you down faster than your cable company would over using Bittorrent. So that's why I don't buy your argument about RIAA having 'hard time' shutting down OpenTape users.

The whole point of my post is that OpenTape is solving the wrong problem. It's a typical techie trap: trying to solve a social/legal problem with a technical solution... it almost never works.

<comment><USER3> Good point about the difficulty of setting up OpenTape for an average music lover.

Your argument led me to thinking about the difference between Muxtape/OpenTape and the mixtapes that DJs have been posting online for years.

One major difference is that most mixtapes I see have no track listings, and therefore record companies are not able to pinpoint copyright violations efficiently. I suppose then the questions is: How important is the track listing to the success of Muxtape?

Another reason is obscurity of the site/DJ. But if the Muxtape community fragments into a gaggle of OpenTape sites, perhaps it will have the same effect.

<comment><USER4> Great points! Mixtapes also had the quality of a physical good which meant that you couldn't mass produce them easily so RIAA etc couldn't do much. Muxtape makes distribution easy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So first the RIAA hits muxtape with a copyright blow, then the open source community gives them a body slam by making their code available to competitors. I betcha muxtape clones from china and russia will popup and take away all their momentum.

Life must suck for those guys right now. Does someone know their addresses, I'd like to send them a gift. I'm serious.

</comment><comment><USER6> Mixtapes: the blogs of music

eg: <http://8tracks.com/>

<comment><USER7> <http://soundcloud.com> is very cool too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> the code posts data to three URLs:

define("VERSION_CHECK_URL", "<http://opentape.fm/public/latest_version.php>"); define("ANNOUNCE_SONGS_URL", "<http://opentape.fm/public/announce_songs.php>");

it sends the songs, and the hosting's site URL to opentape.fm

looks like a honeypot...?

<comment><USER9> On the Requirements section it says: "PHP 5 curl extension is required for update notification and publishing to the Opentape Discovery Network." Would be nice to have that more prominent or available as an option to enable (instead of hardcoded and kinda obscure).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am not sure about hurting the RIAA but Muxtape is dead.

</comment><comment><USER11> Awesome. The internet is an unstoppable force.</comment>


Best way to fight climate change? Plant a trillion trees - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-07-climate-trillion-trees.html <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This idea needs to be repeated over and over until everyone in the world is aware of it.</comment>


Naming things (2015) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www2.stat.duke.edu/~rcs46/lectures_2015/01-markdown-git/slides/naming-slides/naming-slides.pdf <comment><USER2> The real lesson of this discussion seems to be: metadata has failed our expectations.

All this ancillary stuff that we'd like attached to files, like dates, client names and projects, versions and so on, are metadata. Some systems keep metadata _in_ files: EXIF, Word, PDF. Some systems have conventions for this instead: header blocks in source code. But if neither of those applies? Only place you can put it reliably is the filename :(

<comment><USER3> _> lesson of this discussion seems to be: metadata has failed our expectations._

I've written several "disk and file catalog" utilities over the years so I inevitably spent a lot of time thinking about the "metadata" problem.

I think the issue is that it's _impossible_ to solve metadata in a universal way that satisfies all scenarios. This is why metadata often ends up being inscribed into the filename. It's the "least worse" solution.

Let's take one example of the scientific data of csv files. Typical Comma- Separated-Value files do not have metadata fields such as author, measuring device, timestamp of readings, GPS coordinates. (Yes, csv files sometimes have a first line for "column names" which is arguably metadata but that's not the higher-level metadata I'm talking about.)

Exactly _where_ does one put that high-level metadata?

1) If one makes a new pseudo-standard that signifies any lines at the top the csv beginning with "//" as metadata, that means that modifying any metadata of a 100GB csv file (e.g. change author from "John Doe" to "Jacob Doe" is rewriting the whole 100GB file to add 1 byte.) As a related issue, let's say you have hash of "e1bb76e7391b93eb12" for the csv file. You really want a stable hash that represents the actual "raw data" of the csv file. You don't necessarily want the hash to change just because the metadata changed. In this case, embedding metadata into the file itself makes certain operations worse since typical hash utilities don't have "intelligence" about which parts of the file is "important" for hashing. (A similar problem is scanning mp3 files for duplicates. If 2 mp3 files have bit-identical audio output but the metadata tags are different, are they the same or different?!? It depends.)

2) if you put metadata at the end, typical utilities won't know about about it. (UNIX has "tail" command but standard MS Windows does not. The tail command is also unstructured and read-only which makes it a non-solution for managing end-of-file metadata fields. Also, the "quick" view of GUI file managers show the top of the file and not the bottom of it.)

3) If you put metadata in a separate file, it easily gets lost. File managers like MacOS Finder and MS Windows Explorer don't know when 2 files are supposed to be "treated as one unit" vs separately.

4) If you try to put metadata in a separate special area using os file system features suchs MS "NTFS alternate data streams" or Mac OSX "resource forks", they will get lost when transferring across incompatible filesystems or uploading to Amazon S3.

If one is feeling uncharitabe, one could say the MS WinFS[1] was a spectacular failed attempt at unifying metadata. (A relational database that makes metadata more of a 1st class concept.) Nobody has tried it on that level since. Even Apple's new file APFS system didn't have the same metadata ambitions as WinFS.

The combination of tradeoffs leads everybody to re-invent the idea of embedding metadata (including namespacing hierarchies) into filenames. The article's suggestions for scientific data filenames looks very similar to filenames that companies end up using for ETL pipelines.[2]

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load)

<comment><USER4> Couldn't we just come up with some convention for "expanded filenames" where the meta-data is included in the file name itself? In the UI portion, you see what you see now, no difference, but say anything after the // delimiter in the file name is considered meta data and not shown in the windows/terminal UI.

Not sure if it's a good solution but if I were to put the meta data somewhere I would somehow try to put it in the identifier of the file (the name) as it is data that would help me identify the file AND it's content!

<comment><USER5> This is partially what filesystem forks/streams were supposed to be for. The big problem, as mentioned, is that this works for the OS, but isn't somehow transferred to third parties.

[https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askcore/2013/03/24/alter...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askcore/2013/03/24/alternate- data-streams-in-ntfs/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(file_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_\(file_system\))

<comment><USER4> thanks for the links!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem I've found with file names like those described as "awesome" in the fifth slide is that if you have a bunch of them open at once, your taskbar/switcher/windows menu truncates them all to something like "2013-06-26_BRAFWTNEG...", making finding the one you want a bit more burdensome.

Jakob Nielsen had a post (a link for which I cannot find) recommending that web-page titles put the most specific information at the beginning. Doing something similar with file names (e.g., calling them "H01_MutantFraction...2013-06-26.csv", etc) would trade some of the advantages of the proposed scheme for speed of finding and switching between files when you're actually using them.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you look at the filename examples, there seems to be an _implicit_ suggestion of naming a group of related files using a common prefix.

If one needs to distinguish _groups_ of files, why not just put them in _directories_? That's the reason directories exist, no?

I can somewhat understand if some (bad) software is written to look for files only in a single directory and you have to put everything there. But otherwise, it seems pretty pointless to use a common prefix and make filenames longer.

<comment><USER8> You loose the information in the directory title if the file is downloaded or from viewing the title in an application title bar.

<comment><USER9> yeah, thinking along these lines filenames themselves are the easiest way to display the contents of a file, and that data travels with each and every file no matter where they're mv'd to, uploaded, deployed, shared, etc.

It's like brand name packaging, all the information including nutrition packed neatly on the outside. You don't go to the store and buy 'bread' you buy '2017-08-18-00-natures-own-dbl-fiber-wheat'.

This whole pdf resonated with me because it made me realize I'd developed these almost identical practices without knowing it. Mostly over time, trial and error, and a kind of natural selection, when it comes to sake of ease.

Cool stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm constantly harping on everybody to pay attention to their file naming.

I'm a graphic designer, so for me everything is Client/YYMM- Project/_FINAL/YYMM-COLLATERAL-NAME

Within each project there is a _PROCESS folder with a _ELEMENTS subfolder for pieces the client has given me to work with.

For invoices I do YYMMDD-ClientName-Project-Sum.pdf. When the invoice is paid, I rename the file to add -PAID- before the client name. Its simple, but its allowed me to easily track and maintain projects and billing over the years.

If I end up working for another 83 years, I guess I'll pad the year with a 0...

Proper file management is an undervalued skill and should be taught both in school and in corporate environments. In an old tech job we had a public folder on the server that was total chaos. So many people insisted on naming their files MAY-%day%-%contents%-%personsname% -- and, as you'd expect, people spent countless hours per year trying to hunt down that one file so-and-so worked on before they left for another job.

<comment><USER6> > I'm a graphic designer, so for me everything is Client/YYMM- > Project/_FINAL/YYMM-COLLATERAL-NAME

> Within each project there is a _PROCESS folder with a _ELEMENTS subfolder > for pieces the client has given me to work with.

Out of curiosity, why do you have the year/month in the names of both the project folder and the collateral file?

And why do you start the names of your final/process/elements folders with underscores?

<comment><USER11> I can't speak to stevewillows' answer, but my girlfriend uses a similar naming scheme in her architecture work. The project folder contains a year-month prefix indicating when the project started, and any year-month prefixes below that indicate when that part of the project was initiated. It maps the project in time for her: this folder tells her when she first talked to the client, this folder tells her when design started, this folder tells her when she got the first construction bids. The date on the top-level folder is extremely useful when looking through old projects. Just from consulting those files so often, she knows when most of her major projects were started and finished and how long each phase took, which is something I don't remember (and can't reconstruct) for most of the projects I've worked on. She has folders like this going back ten years. I can't even imagine what that would look like for my projects. I'm a bit jealous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author forgot to write down the most important reason for the whole exercise: file transfer.

Modern operating systems index the contents of your files, so finding all your files on project "foo" is only a search away. If you are a GUI user, then file naming isn't really that important for locating data on your machine.

Where file names matter is because there is 40 years of cruft out there which absolutely refuses to move metadata along with files. So you can touch your files to set dates, organize them in directories or tag them to your heart's content in Mac OS or Windows, but you will lose all that information when you attach the file to an email or put it in DropBox.

So you only have a choice of two places to put metadata in such a way that the metadata will be carried along with the file- the file name or the file contents.

Putting the data in the file contents lacks discoverability and in many cases the applications you use to manipulate the files don't allow for additional metadata anyway. Also, some file types (Word .docx files, jpegs, MP3s) get their metadata updated and/or scrambled when you open them with specific applications. So really your only valid choice is to put it in the file name.

The author's specific recommendations (use underscores and hyphens for delimiting) assume that you really want to access the files with the command line and use globbing. Other than that implication, the recommendations are sound.

</comment><comment><USER13> > avoid [...] accented characters

It's certainly good advice and I definitely avoid using non-ASCII characters in filenames in practice. But I can't help thinking that advice like that is why support for Unicode is still buggy in many places.

I see nothing fundamentally wrong with using non-ASCII for filenames (and the slides don't give any reasoning), if only random software wouldn't mangle encodings, sorting order, or plain refuse to accept such filenames.

<comment><USER14> In my view the main problem is in sharing those files with others. Other systems may not support those chars or the other users may not be aware of how they are sorted and even how to type them in a search.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For those who don't know Jenny Bryan, she is a wonderful force for good in the R community. It seems like these filenames are a little contentious here on HN, but IMO this will always be a big improvement over the file-naming practices of someone who has given little or no thought to the topic. Which I am guessing was her intended audience.

If you're getting into R or data analysis, check out [http://stat545.com/topics.html](http://stat545.com/topics.html). She has put a lot of thought into the project management aspects of carrying out a data science project that don't get discussed as often as other, sexier topics.

</comment><comment><USER16> My only real concern is with left-padding numbers with 0s when you don't know in advance how big the numbers are going to get. Do you pad to 2 or 3 digits or...

<comment><USER17> When you have a long list of numbered filenames with no padding, pipe the list through "sort -V" for "version number" ordering.

Edit: Glitchmr has a better solution below, "ls -v".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why left pad numbers if you could simply use better tools that properly sort numbers (instead of using ASCII order which doesn't even make sense for ordering purposes). For instance, use `ls -v` instead of `ls` (possibly as an alias).

</comment><comment><USER19> The pdf didnt mention the most important point - keep it short and to the point

Its so hard to use CI interface and type that filename every time or navigating to in file explorer when its so long to read and the important bits of info should always be at the start.

Iso date conventions arent necessary since most files have metadata associated with it (create and modified date) so adding ISO date format is redundant for human made files . As you can always use a bulk renamer at any point.

But my point still stands just sort regularly and add some sorting identifier at the front of the file. Depending on who is working on file and what context it is a simple number at front suffices 01, 02, 03, etc or it can be a word and version number at end

Lastly the author didnt mention foldernames. Those need to be one or two words at most to help segregate information if theres lots of files in that one folder

If your creating machine made / autogenerated saved reports following a standard ISO state convention makes sense though, with regexable slugs, etc

</comment><comment><USER20> There's some empirical work on how developers encounter and respond to naming anti-patterns e.g. [http://www.veneraarnaoudova.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/2...](http://www.veneraarnaoudova.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/10/2014-EMSE-Arnaodova-et-al-Perception-LAs.pdf) and associated googlescholar search [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,34&q=lingu...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,34&q=linguistic+anti+patterns+and+how+developers)

</comment><comment><USER21> I always name from general to specific — left to right.

Example: client_project_element-name_20170818.txt

When sorted by name, similar items are grouped together.

</comment><comment><USER22> MMDDYYYY

I like to call this middle endian.

</comment><comment><USER23> For some reason I want to avoid names beginning with numbers. All my filenames can be used as an identifier (except the extension part).

i.e. [a-zA-Z][0-9a-zA-Z_]+\\.[a-z0-9]+

</comment><comment><USER24> I name my files like this:

      2017-04-04 #S4907 #Choir List of names.pdf
      2017-04-05 #EXCITE #S=5005 Notes on Data Repositories.pdf
      2017-04-06 #ARAG #S=5031 #Amount=14.2 #CUR=EUR Invoice.pdf

with the following semantic:

* date. Every file name is prefixed with the ISO date to facilitate sorting

* tags. The syntax #<tagname> to categorize documents with tags.

* key-value pairs. The syntax $<key>=value let's us attach structured information to the document name.

and keep them in a single large folder.

On top of this, I have written some shell tooling to normalize, view, and shuffle around those documents: [https://github.com/HeinrichHartmann/pile](https://github.com/HeinrichHartmann/pile)

E.g. `pile extract EXCITE` will extract all files with tag #EXCITE to a separate folder named #EXCITE. There is also a HTML form that helps with proper naming of new files.

File management is still a pain for me, but this at least gives me some confidence that I can retrieve stored documents reasonably well. I hope, that one day I'll be able to auto-generate expense reports and tax filings, from properly tagged up filenames.

<comment> grif-fin You are suggesting a file name format with spaces in it?

<comment><USER24> yeah. I just can't stand all those dashes ;)

Just make sure to quote your variables in bash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not a fan of dates at the beginning of the file name. If a file name needs a date I always put it at the end so future versions group when sorting the files.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice rules :) I especially like the use of underline-delimited metadata in filenames, saved me on a huge research deadline once.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's a nice set of guidelines, but why the snail on page 15?

<comment><USER28> I think it's to embrace the slug: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_URL#Slug)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Considered that most of the world uses "little-endian" format for date writing ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Date_format_by_country_(n...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Date_format_by_country_\(new\).png) ) how comes ISO 8601 was set on "big-endian"?

Not so practical for anything else but file naming IMHO...

<comment><USER25> First off and most importantly ISO 8601 is a standard for _data interchange_ so being easy to parse visually and with a computer is a feature. ISO 8601 groups and sorts well without needing special rules and remains consistent all the way from the year to the millisecond. It is easier to parse visually when you are looking at a list of values, especially if they are similar.

Second "little endian" dates are inconsistent because the year is still big endian. If you want to remain consistent you would have to write the current year as 1720 (or even 7120!) because the years (or decades) are smaller than the century. To achieve the consistency of ISO 8601 with little endian time you would also have to write seconds before minutes and minutes before hours.

<comment><USER29> Right, very good point about the endianness of the year. Makes sense now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Those filenames look _terrible_ to me.

BRAFWTNEGASSAY doesnt make any sense. To distinguish between the filenames you actually have to read the full filename, and with such long filenames chances are they won't fully be displayed, so that you have 2013-06-26_BRAFWTNEGASSAY_Plasmid-Cellline-100-1MutantFrac... For the first four files.

Keeping cruft out of your filenames seems like a much, much better way to name files. Also, most systems keep track of the creation data, no need to keep it in the filename. I think it's better to give files an id.

<comment><USER31> BRAFWTNEGASSAY would make sense to the owner of the file or someone working in that particular project. Consider it a project name, or a keyword that is relevant in that particular context. If you're working with files from different sources with multiple contributors this sort of approach works brilliantly.

You could have named it differently: 2013-06-26_KUTKLOON7_Plasmid- Cellline-100-1MutantFrac

Creation date can sometimes be lost if you copy/move the file between different mediums</comment></comment>


Lego logic gates and mechanical computing - <AUTHOR> https://www.randomwraith.com/logic.html <comment><USER2> This is super exciting, but I find the website honestly quite hard to look at.

Looking forward to someone building a larger system with this. Or... a Yosys backend?

<comment><USER3> I don't have a website for it, or even any photos (there are likely non- digital photos in a drawer at my parent's house) but I built several lego- pneumatic calculating machines in the 90s, culminating in a pneumatic rubik's cube manipulator and a couple walkers where all the movement was controlled via air-logic. I was inspired by the hydraulic systems my dad used to work on on large boats.

Basically, I'm sure there's larger lego-logic systems out there somewhere. Here, I found an interesting one [0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYi9sJkS19Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYi9sJkS19Q)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a 3d printable logic gate that can be reconfigured [https://www.ims.uni-hannover.de/3dprintlogic.html](https://www.ims.uni- hannover.de/3dprintlogic.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> For those of you who remember this when it was "the 2004 slashdot phenomenon", the newer additions include powered (motorized) rod logic, and rotational logic.

[https://www.randomwraith.com/blog.html](https://www.randomwraith.com/blog.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Makes me think about NASA'S idea to send a purely mechanical rover to Venus, because no computer ca resist the heat for any serious amount of time: [https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6933](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6933)

I hope this takes off!

<comment><USER7> I can see how you control somewhat and send signals back what I don't really get is how they'll do instrumentation and take readings more complex than stuff like wind speed and temperature.

<comment><USER6> Good question, especially any kind of visual sensor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow. Nice!

How long until someone applies this to Ben Eater's 8-bit computer? What size would such a device take?

<comment><USER9> I think its size would boggle our minds

the megaprocessor[1] is built from pure transistors

[1] [http://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html](http://www.megaprocessor.com/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> We need a Babbage Difference Engine made out of Legos.

<comment><USER11> Here ya go:

[https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/BabbageEn...](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~chazelle/courses/BIB/BabbageEngine.html)

If you google "Lego Babbage" or similar, his machine seems to be something of a phenom...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> how about a rotational flip flop?</comment>


The trouble with FreeBSD - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/712308/ <comment><USER2> I fucking love FreeBSD. Seriously, I use it any chance I can. I have a Debian VM that I use to do development on because of the tool chain I have to use. But for my production personal websites that I run I choose FreeBSD.

Nothing in this article makes me want to change my mind. On the contrary seeing this article on a 'Linux' website generally lowers my opinion of both the 'Linux Community' and LWN. If LWN had fewer articles like this, and more articles actually communicating useful information to me, I might actually read it more.

I used to use Debian almost exclusively, but ever since this systemd BS I've gone FreeBSD as much as possible. This isn't about personalities, it's about me not caring about the problems that systemd is trying to solve.

<comment><USER3> The article isn't bad tho… it's pretty much a transcript of a talk with the same title _by a FreeBSD Core member_.

The comments… yeah, there are people whining about "Marxists" "ruining projects" or something. Welp.

<comment> Anthony-G I skimmed through the comments and most of them seem to be at odds with the content of the article (which seems to offer constructive opinion). The very first comment is frankly bizarre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I clicked on this expecting some technical stuff and all I got was this BS social/community whining.

Well, even in the worst case where FreeBSD community is trash, they have one of the best kernel implementations and one of the best open source OS documentation.

<comment><USER5> I agree, it was a disappointing article. Even the technical section about source control at the beginning seems a bit odd. First they note how huge the codebase is, then move on to compare the project to Django and Python?

Let's remember that FreeBSD is an entire OS, not just a kernel. If you want to compare it to the linux world you have to imagine the kernel + the GNU userland + the distro specific utilities and package management of something like debian or red hat.

It's not really surprising that the codebase ends up being huge and that you can't just change the architecture and tooling around it to use the trending software stack of the day.

On the other hand the fact that FreeBSD is so comprehensive is the killer feature for me when compared to something like Linux. It's a full OS, with everything (usually) playing nice with each other, a single documentation for the entire base system etc...

I also find that the kernel code is generally a little nicer than linux's, although linux is more featureful overall.

Yes, FreeBSD is slower moving than Linux and generally more conservative. That's not a bug, that's a feature.

<comment><USER6> Hi. OP (original presenter?) here.

The whole idea of this talk was about the community side of the project. I make exactly the points you're making regarding code size but that just speaks to the difficulty of managing a community looking after a codebase of that size.

I'm also not criticizing the pace of FreeBSD development so much as I'm criticizing the pace of its leadership (of which I'm a member, don't forget) to deal with issues that would make FreeBSD more fun to work on.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for taking the time to reply. It was just a bit of a surprising read from my point of view, as somebody who's not directly involved in the project (like you are) but who's been observing it since around ~2004.

There are three main points in this article: the issue of version control, the "Dragonfly BSD incident", and the GamerGate garbage fire.

Regarding the first issue, while it was sad to see a good dev like Matthew Dillon leave the project, what do you think should have been done better by the leaders of the project? Clearly there was an incompatibility here, maybe having Dillon work on his own project (and then sometimes have a back and forth between Dragonfly and FreeBSD) was the right solution? Would Linux for instance have dealt with the issue better? I recall many personality clashes amongst the Linux "elite", some not so long ago.

The migration away from CVS sure did take a long time, but as you mention yourself the technical challenge was pretty high. Lest we forget, Linus ended up writing his own version control system because the existing solution were not deemed satisfying. And FreeBSD is significantly bigger than linux's codebase. Regarding the test suite, testing operating systems is notoriously difficult (you can't easily abstract away from the hardware to run well contained unit tests). I don't recall Linux having an extensive test suite either.

The GamerGate thing I won't touch with a hundred kilometer pole. How an operating system project got dragged into that I still can't fathom.

So in the end, I don't think those issues are that big of a deal on their own. IMHO the main "trouble" with FreeBSD is simply that its market share is tiny compared to Linux. I'm a big fan of FreeBSD but my IRL job is linux kernel dev, not FreeBSD kernel dev. More and more first party vendors support linux, not any of the *BSDs. "Netcraft confirms it - BSD is dying". There's a momentum problem and I'm not sure switching to github or adding a test suite are going to solve it.

FreeBSD is betamax, linux is VHS. FreeBSD is mercurial, linux is git.

That being said, I don't have a solution either.

<comment><USER7> FreeBSD is pretty common in some market segments, especially infrastructure appliances and devices. It's an easy choice for NAS controllers, internet core routers, email gateways, firewalls, messaging platforms, CDNs. Not to forget the humongous chunk of FreeBSD that is in OSX.

If you think it has a small market share, you're looking at the wrong market.

<comment><USER8> While I agree it is popular in certain circles that use it in high volume, it clearly has a relatively small mindshare among developers and open source contributions. Linux, just the kernel, regularly gets contributions from 100x the people that contribute to FreeBSD base.

<comment><USER7> I'm gonna have to challenge you on that 100x number because I think you may have plucked it from thin air. Obviously contributor numbers are a) hard to define and b) hard to capture, but for an order-of-magnitude estimation, I give you two sources, both of which have incentive and access to maximise the number counted:

1\. Linux. "Over 13,500 developers", [https://www.linuxfoundation.org/announcements/linux- foundati...](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/announcements/linux-foundation- releases-development-report-highlighting-contributions-to-linux)

2\. FreeBSD. I make this a little over 2,300 names: [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributors/article...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributors/article.html)

So I suggest it is a only a 6x difference, or at least in that vicinity.

I imagine that the column inches go overwhelmingly to Linux, but tech journalists are moths to a flame.

<comment><USER8> [https://lwn.net/Articles/708266/](https://lwn.net/Articles/708266/) \-- 1,719 in a ~ten week window.

[https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/](https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/) \-- 128 individual developers have committed to FreeBSD head in the last ~ten week window. (svn log [http://svn.freebsd.org/base/head](http://svn.freebsd.org/base/head) |egrep '^r[0-9]{6,6} \| ' | grep -B999999999 2016-11-25 | cut -d" " -f3 commits.log |sort | uniq | wc -l)

So Linux has more like 13x individual developer count in recent times. You can round that down to 10x if you like, but 6x doesn't tell the recent story.

Note that this is comparing the Linux kernel to FreeBSD base, which is like kernel + glibc + coreutils + binutils + other stuff.

<comment><USER7> Mindshare is not a zero-sum game like market share, so scope of function is irrelevant; and is not a short-term phenomenon, so ten weeks is nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of the problems the PHP project faces. It has the same lack of leadership and just goes by consensus, with the same problems (i.e. little gets done when hard decisions must be made; the system for voting on things has helped a little, though, because it means people who are bold can sometimes get things in). There was also an attempt to adopt a code of conduct and, in its failure, it exposed why the project could benefit from one in the first place.

I suspect a lot of open-source projects have similar issues.

<comment> angry-hacker Why did it fail and what was in the code?

<comment><USER9> Well, there was quite a hostile response from some to it, so its proponent dropped it. What was interesting about the response was how specific individuals did not respond civilly (personal attacks, framing it as a political conspiracy, etc.), thus demonstrating why a code of conduct might be useful.

The original proposal was this: [https://wiki.php.net/rfc/adopt-code-of- conduct?rev=145194062...](https://wiki.php.net/rfc/adopt-code-of- conduct?rev=1451940622)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> " _One day [Randi Harper] decided to block the Gamergate "trash humans" out with a Perl script; it worked, causing them to lose their minds, Rice said, at which point they started attacking FreeBSD._"

Anyone have more info about this? Especially the "Perl script"?

<comment><USER11> She wrote a script that found every Twitter account that followed 2 or more people from her list of supposed Gamergate figures (which included at least one major celebrity) and encouraged people to mass block all the accounts it found as an anti-harassment/anti-Gamergate measure. The result, in social terms, was that everyone was forced to choose between listening to one side or the other, including journalists who wanted to report on Gamergate, and their entire view of the other side was filtered through what that side said about it. It was, hands down, the single most clever and effective use of a technical tool to increase polarization and hostility online I have ever seen. (Especially since it had little impact on either determined axe-grinders who wanted to cause trouble by digging up inflammatory remarks and quoting them out of context or actual harassers.)

<comment><USER12>
        It was, hands down, the single most clever and
        effective use of a technical tool to increase
        polarization and hostility online I have ever
        seen.

This seems like a nonsensical assessment at best. Use of the script was voluntary, and GG was an organized mass-harassment campaign premised on polarizing and hateful nonsense. The whole social phenomenon consisted of a distributed wave of hostility.

I wound up adapting the script myself at one point to mass-block followers of a YouTube/Instagram celebrity who shares my first name and triggers a neverending stream of namespace collisions. It's a reasonable brute-force hack in an environment that lacks real features for dealing with a large population of griefers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The article shows an excellent example of 'moving fast and breaking things':

      < In comparison, Python started on CVS, moved to Subversion
      < in 2004, then to Mercurial in 2009, and is now moving
      < over to GitHub.

I used Python around 2004 and 2005, and never went back to it for my personal projects.

I would rather prefer 'moving slow and preserving things'. Any body here remembered how things went when Linux moved from OSS to ALSA? And now there's this systemd.

<comment><USER13> For people who love python here, do you use python 2 or python 3? 2.7? 2.8? 3.5?

<comment><USER14> I write new stuff in Python3, and what I do easily works on any Python3.

I don't have Python2 code to maintain, but if I had I would seriously consider updating it. Because I think the changes are reasonable for the most part.

Dou you write your C code in GCC C? Intel C? Microsoft C? C89? C99? C11? What libraries and what versions do you use?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love FreeBSD, and I felt like the author of this article does too. It didn't come across as a rant to me, but rather an explanation, and some constructive criticism, of what the author thinks the FreeBSD project could do better.

As with all constructive criticism, you absorb what you feel will help you reach your goals, and reject what doesn't. It is always a good thing to have those insights and options though, I think.

</comment><comment><USER16> The talk was here 2weeks ago in TOP, most of the article is just rewrite of what he said. It's wired to read the same words.

</comment><comment><USER17> DragonFlyBSD vs FreeBSD

Since Dillon was discussed in the article and given he split from FreeBSD 11 years ago ... which OS now is in better shape overall (technically)?

DragonFlyBSD or FreeBSD?

<comment><USER8> They each have pros and cons. What are you looking for?

<comment><USER17> A summary of what the pros and cons are of each OS (based on the current versions available).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Petty history aside, the project needs to be more open in communication. There's too many secret mailing lists and mystery discussion, which is a common thread in all the problems the list describes.

</comment><comment><USER19> My early hacking days were primarily on FreeBSD, and though I idealogically agree with RMS and therefore GPL, which is why I push myself onto GNU ecosystems, I must admit the one thing that often tempts me back to bsd land is the consistentcy in system tools and functions, even across other BSD's. I have seen GNU/Linux abused just like I feared BSD systems were going to be, so for practicality purposes I'm seeing less and less of a difference, but oh what I would give for a GPL focused BSD like ecosystem focused Linux effort.

</comment><comment><USER20> Duplicates [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13550908](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13550908)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't think criticizing FreeBSD's "age" is exactly reasonable in this context, seeing as how Linux is two years older (and GNU even older than that).

<comment><USER8> FreeBSD is a derivative of BSD, which has history going back to 1977. It _long_ predates Linux (1991) and even predates public announcement of GNU (1983).

<comment><USER21> I personally don't consider that to be exactly relevant (if it were, then we could say that macOS is also older than GNU, which is sufficiently unintuitive to be misleading). It'd be more relevant if FreeBSD was actually maintained by UC Berkeley's CSRG as an official successor to BSD itself; otherwise, we're dealing with a kind of ship of Theseus situation where things are replaced and rewritten and "age" becomes very ambiguous.

I also don't really consider "age" in and of itself to be a real factor at all here anyway. It implies (probably not intentionally, but the implication is there nonetheless) that things should be rewritten from scratch all the time in order to avoid "old" things, which would be silly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What's the deal with all this anti-meritocracy stuff? Can't we all just work on a level playing field and move past this junk? Seems like not doing so causes a lot more problems than it solves.

<comment><USER23> Once upon a time, social justice types supported meritocracy. That was in the era when having classical musicians audition behind a screen increased the % of women.

Unfortunately, the technology world has not had the same experience. When technology becomes more meritocratic (e.g., audition via github/coding tests/open source contributions rather than interviews), we get more Asians, fewer non-Asian minorities and fewer women.

Because meritocracy in technology fails to achieve the goal of "gotta catch them all", it must be opposed.

<comment><USER24> Google and Facebook have both claimed that women and minorities tend to outperform hiring scores, which is why they hire them more aggressively.

I think there are two factors at play:

* Generation and exchange of ideas and approaches is the most important part of software engineering on a team. Diversity of gender and background probably gives this factor a bump.

* People are biased, both consciously and unconsciously, against certain minorities. This means lower evaluation scores and weaker resumes (since the world shares the bias).

But whatever the reasons, Google and Facebook are pretty good at this whole data analysis thing, so I wouldn't discount their experiences.

<comment><USER23> I'd be curious to see this analysis. Can you link to it?

Here's a hypothetical. Imagine google made an error and it turns out that their analysis has a sign error. Blacks/women actually underperform. Would you favor flipping the sign on whatever action you propose? If not, why not?

I ask this because in a number of other contexts, the sign is actually flipped. Blacks drastically _underperform_ what would be predicted from college entrance scores, they are less likely to pay back loans (holding other things constant), and more likely to commit crime.

 _Generation and exchange of ideas and approaches is the most important part of software engineering on a team. Diversity of gender and background probably gives this factor a bump._

I'm the only person of my race/nationality at my current company, but I've never really observed this effect. Can you tell me how to tap into these powers?

I admit, I do sometimes provide ideas that no one else has, mainly in the area of bayesian stats, low level performance hacking and probabilistic data structures. Is that what you mean? Are these the secret powers unavailable if you don't have someone of my race?

<comment><USER24> > Imagine google made an error and it turns out that their analysis has a sign > error. Blacks/women actually underperform. Would you favor flipping the sign > on whatever action you propose? If not, why not?

No, because of the above point about diversity. It has an effect on more than just the individual. I don't know if Google has made any claims about the following, but it's been noted that, for example, diverse management teams tend to outperform nondiverse ones.

> I admit, I do sometimes provide ideas that no one else has, mainly in the > area of bayesian stats, low level performance hacking and probabilistic data > structures. Is that what you mean? Are these the secret powers unavailable > if you don't have someone of my race?

You are being intentionally facetious. I know you're a smart person, that you're very probably aware of what diversity arguments are about, and this reply is thoughtless in a disrespectful way. I'm only spelling it out to avoid downvoters: the idea is that different approaches and attitudes are informed by race, culture, background and gender in ways that are difficult to measure in the interview process.

For the record, I would consider a white hillbilly or southerner as 'diverse' in most computer workplaces.

<comment><USER23> _No, because of the above point about diversity._

That point does not apply to lending or crime prediction. There is no collective decisionmaking on the part of parolees or borrowers.

Do you have any objection to using your same solutions, but with the opposite direction, in this areas? E.g., if google should try and hire more blacks (due to them overperforming), should BofA try to lend less money to them (because they underperform)?

Similarly, since we know diversity harms group cohesion, should companies which value group cohesion avoid it?

 _You are being intentionally facetious. I know you 're a smart person, that you're very probably aware of what diversity arguments are about, and this reply is thoughtless in a disrespectful way. I'm only spelling it out to avoid downvoters: the idea is that different approaches and attitudes are informed by race, culture, background and gender in ways that are difficult to measure in the interview process._

I don't know why you find this disrespectful. Could you clarify?

I'm simply asking, concretely, how "race, culture, background and gender" inform different approaches and attitudes to detecting systematic failures in a sensor network? Or similarly, how does this inform different approaches to querying a dataset consisting of a normalized SQL schema together with a collection of very large structured files?

I'm being facetious because I consider this idea to be patently ridiculous. In most of my jobs I've been the only person of my race present, and it's literally _never_ affected any professional task.

That's also why I'm asking for specifics, rather than vague allusions to some study you kind of remember reading.

I do of course know what the real argument is about. Diversity is a sacred value and all the arguments you've brought up are actually just post-hoc justifications for a behavior you virtuous. I'm just arguing that there is little more than that.

<comment><USER24> Well, I'll give you an example.

It's popular among computer nerds to dismiss other peoples' ideas. They might do something like attack someone's ideas with intentional misunderstanding, lazy thinking, and facetious reasoning. In short, they do not show the bare minimum of consideration for others' ideas, instead looking first for avenues of attack. Having ignored and attacked the other person, they then claim no disrespect was meant. They might say something like "I don't know why you find this disrespectful. Could you clarify?"

It does not occur to them that being able to attack peoples' ideas in this pompous way is actually a position of privilege. Anyone can do it, but people born a step ahead are more likely to not reflect on their position, or even feel entitled to it.

In my experience, women and people from disadvantaged backgrounds--people who were not praised to the moon for writing "Hello World" in eighth grade--are less likely to behave in this way.

This is self-evidently an enormous advantage on engineering teams.

Usual disclaimer: personal experience, your mileage may vary, this is just one example, privileged backgrounds have advantages too, yada yada yada.

<comment><USER23> I did not attack you or ignore you. I directly addressed one of your arguments and attempted to determine whether the other argument is your "true rejection" [1].

On the contrary, the only person ignoring the other's points and making anything close to an attack is you. You've accused me of being disrespectful, called me lazy and accused me of intentional misunderstanding, while simultaneously NOT addressing any of my core arguments.

Quite entertaining, I must admit.

[1] Specifically, I think even if that argument could be proven false, it would not change your conclusion at all. So bringing it up is merely a distraction. See also: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/wj/is_that_your_true_rejection/)

<comment><USER24> The question was if diversity is valuable in engineering. I gave a specific example of a specific kind of diversity that is valuable to engineering teams.

If you're interested in Google's data, they make an excellent search engine that you can use to find that kind of stuff. I encourage you to do your own research, in part because I think I've done enough work leading you to the proverbial water.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>